


Orchid

by therealmnemo, winterlight89



Category: Original Work, Urban Shadows
Genre: Anxiety, Attempted Sexual Assault, Depression, Drug Use, Gender Dysphoria, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Role-Playing Game, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-06-08 15:04:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 26,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15245925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therealmnemo/pseuds/therealmnemo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterlight89/pseuds/winterlight89
Summary: Orchid is written by Dawn Saas and Nic Frankenberry.You can find Dawn@dsaas89- You can find Nic@nicfrankenberryandtherealmnemo





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Orchid is written by Dawn Saas and Nic Frankenberry.
> 
> You can find Dawn [@dsaas89](https://twitter.com/dsaas89)  - You can find Nic [@nicfrankenberry](https://twitter.com/nicfrankenberry) and [therealmnemo](http://therealmnemo.tumblr.com/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Drug Use, Gender Dysphoria, Implied Sexual Violence, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depictions of Severe Depression and Anxiety

_Sabine knows._

Melika Ghazi’s hand shuddered as she took the joint from Sabine. Sabine couldn’t help but notice Melika’s shaky hands. Melika took a deep drag and coughed out a swirling pillow of white smoke.

The dissipating cloud was whisked away by a spring breeze that tore across the second floor balcony where Melika and Sabine leaned against the railing. Sabine Almeida’s cropped mop, a feathered hallucination of purples and pinks,  refused to budge. Melika’s shoulder-length black hair flew across her face.

_The hair isn’t fooling anybody either._

 

Melika’s bent her head down as she brushed her hair out of her face. As the last tangle of her knotted mane went up into a ponytail, Melika was greeted by Chad’s cramped backyard, which was swimming beneath her in a haze of grass and anxiety. A couple dozen students and townies were packed behind the brick red rowhouse, red solo cups full of beer and liquor. A Hodges bro was blasting aggressive house off into the Oakland night.

Melika and Sabine were perched on a narrow balcony above the yard that connected the master bedroom to one of the guest bedrooms. Melika passed the joint back to Sabine.

“Your hair looks good up.”

Melika blinked twice and then smiled. She fought to keep her brown eyes from watering.

“Thanks…”

Sabine’s more practiced lungs inhaled for nearly 20 seconds and then filtered out the smoke in controlled jets from their nostrils. Sabine never coughed after a toke. Melika would have been more impressed by Sabine’s lung capacities if she hadn’t seen this trick so many times in the last four months. It ranked among the less impressive of Sabine’s particular parlor tricks.

Melika watched Sabine bob their head to the music. Somebody else must have gotten the aux cable. The pummeling dance track was still EDM, but the musicality was jazzier. Melika thought she heard an actual saxophonist playing on the track and not just a sample.

Melika was starting to think that if she took another hit from the joint, she might even be able to dance with Sabine.

_Who would want to dance with you?_

Melika looked down and studied the crowd. A group of Omikron Epsilon Delta freshies wearing rave glow paint on their faces were taking jello shots. The paint flickered against a crescent moon. OED was the only co-ed frat on campus. Melika had been a sister since this time a year ago, but this was her first OED party the whole semester. Down in the thick of the action, another group of dolled up freshies were serving drinks in formal tops and their underwear.

_Is that Eric from Spanish? Holy shit, is that his…?_

“Eric Haversham’s dick is pretty much always visible from at least 50 meters. It would be impressive if he ever lasted longer than 90 seconds”

Sabine was also studying the crowd below. They were not in OED. They didn’t meet the pledge requirements although Melika suspected the rush committee would have made an exception if they knew what Sabine was actually capable of. However, Melika had pledged to keep Sabine’s secrets to herself.

Melika followed Sabine’s steely gaze to Eric’s bulge. Sabine’s russet hands clenched on the balcony. “Couldn’t eat pussy for shit either.”

Melika started laughing… deep, bellowing guffaws but the music was so loud that nobody on the ground could hear her. Sabine let Melika’s laughs and then giggles subside and started to pass the joint back to her when the door to the guest bedroom opened.

A man in his mid-30s stepped onto the balcony. His layered auburn hair reached just to the nape of his neck, and he was wearing a purple, satin paisley vest over a white shirt and black silk pants. He reached into his vest and started to pull out a vape pen but then noticed Melika and Sabine standing on the other end of the balcony. He stopped and put the vape pen back in his pocket when he saw the joint in Sabine’s outstretched hand.

Melika knew the man although he was paying little attention to her. He was OED’s faculty sponsor at Hodges and an alumni of the Columbia chapter. Professor Arnoldson started taking great, theatrical sniffs of the midnight air.

“Is that a medicinal sativa?”

Sabine looked the beggar up and down, winked at Melika, and then swiveled with joint in hand towards their guest.

“Better.”

Professor Arnoldson brushed his hand against Sabine’s as he took the joint, and Melika was fairly certain the contact wasn’t accidental. Sabine grimaced, and Melika’s suspicions were confirmed. Professor Arnoldson took a heavy drag, making cutesy, nonchalant faces about how casual this was. Melika and Sabine were not impressed. When Arnoldson finally exhaled, a prismatic river of purples and reds snaked out of his nostrils and whistled out of his mouth. Melika thought the melody might have been Sondheim. He took a second, smaller drag and then handed the joint back to Sabine. Arnoldson bowed his head, and then returned through the guest bedroom door.

“How old was that guy?”

Sabine offered the joint back to Melika who shook her hands no. Sabine shrugged and took their own drag.

“That’s Professor Arnoldson. He wrote that play”

“What play?”

“The one that won a Tony a couple years ago. It was about a haunted schoolhouse. The protagonist was a teacher that was the childhood lover of the 16 year old ghost that still haunts the classroom. It was all about what it means for them to still love each other now.”

“That sounds fucking gross.”

“It was.”

“What is that guy doing at Hodges?”

Melika was about to tell Sabine the rumors of Dr. Arnoldson’s sudden departure from New York when the master bedroom door swung open.

“Ssssaaabine!”

Chad was standing in his balcony doorway. He was slumped against the door frame, and he had a full wine glass in his hand. He was wearing his black bar frames which everyone knew were purely for show. Melika suddenly became aware of her contacts getting dry and how her glasses were at her and Sabine’s apartment. Melika was also getting cotton mouth. She couldn’t tell if it was cause she was high or because of how long it had been since she’d had sex or even masturbated but Melika was pretty sure Chad was looking hotter than normal in his argyle sweater over an untucked dress shirt and jeans that hugged his ass for days.

“Chad!”

Sabine ran to Chad and hugged him and some of Chad’s “wine” sloshed on Melika’s dress, and Melika realized he was drinking vodka straight from the wine glass.

Chad pulled away from Sabine and looked them up and down. Sabine was in their fitted pinstripe suit with the thin red stripes.

“Sabine… we need to make out. Right now.”

“Of course.”

Sabine threw their arms around Chad, and Melika watched in quiet awe as the pair sloppily mauled each other.

Chad disentangled himself from Sabine and then straightened his disheveled hair back into its regular, immaculate coif. Chad turned to Melika and offered his hand, and the pair did the OED handshake which Melika had never quite gotten the hang of. She couldn’t bend her fingers at just the right moment to interlock in just the right ways with her brothers and sisters. Chad leaned back against the doorframe and realized Melika was still staring back and forth between him and Sabine.

“My boyfriend doesn’t mind. He’s made out with Sabine too,” Chad dramatically whispered.

Sabine laughed.

“You’re a better kisser than Kyle.”

“I knowwww.”

Chad finished off the glass and then looked at Sabine with complete seriousness.

“That was like _really_ hot… does that mean I’m pan?”

Sabine shrugged their shoulders and smirked. Chad disappeared inside his own head and lost grip on the wine glass he was holding which fell on the stone base of the balcony and shattered.

“Shit.”

Chad summoned what little remaining concentration he had and whispered.

“ _Hetoke_.”

The shattered glass collected itself and reformed as the spilt vodka congealed in the air. The glass and liquor finished re-arranging and the whole, filled glass returned to Chad’s hand.

“Party foul averted.”

Chad tossed the vodka over the side of the balcony, narrowly missing an OED server in in a speedo, smeared in a haze of bright orange paint.

“We should do that again sometime.”

Chad gave Melika the peace sign and then stumbled back into his bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Melika turned back to the crowd that was slowing down but hadn’t yet begun to disperse. It was Midterms.

_That you won’t be taking._

Sabine sidled up by Melika and rested their head against Melika’s forearms. Melika’s tense posture relaxed. Sabine was half Melika’s height, and Melika stooped down a bit so she could rest her head against Sabine’s.

“Do you need to go home? We can head out if you want.”

Melika shook her head no and Sabine wasn’t sure how intentional the forcefulness of the shake was.

“I’m fine. I need to do this.”

Sabine grabbed Melika’s left hand with both of their own and squeezed tightly.

“And you have. You don’t have to feel bad if you can’t do more.”

Melika sandwiched Sabine’s hands with hers. “I know, but I can. I… _have_ to.”

Melika and Sabine stood in silence on the balcony for nearly a minute. The house music stopped reverberating the pane glass sliding door that led to Chad’s room. Chad stumbled out of his kitchen door downstairs.

“One of our lovely neighbors… FUCK YOU MR. KOWALSKI… complained about the noise so we shall celebrate our freshies Bloom inside.”

The party was starting to retreat inside when Sabine and Melika heard the singing. Melika recognized the melody. Sabine did not. The voice was soft and sad. To Sabine it sounded like home. Not the home they knew with their mother and not the home they were starting to make with Melika. It felt like a place they’d only been once. A home they had never been able to know. Sabine saw the cave and the waterfall, the moss and the orchids. They could smell the earth and taste the breeze.

The singing stopped, and Sabine was back on the balcony. There was a girl they didn’t know standing at the balcony’s other end, staring off into the night. The girl was white and had thick, curly brown hair. Her nose was wide but handsome, and she was in a dark green dress that fell just past her knees.

Melika’s reaction to the song was more traumatic than nostalgic. From the first bar, Melika found herself back in the elevator. Feeling swept away by the melody’s twisting descents. Thinking about Natasha Khan and Victoria LeGrand and the first time she took acid and played  _Blue_. Doubled over by the drugs inside of her, carrying her down a dizzying, nauseating rollercoaster she desperately wanted off of. Gutted by her inability to escape that night and this song and everything that had come to bear.

Sabine waved at the woman.

“ _Dios mios_ … you can sing.”

The girl kept staring.

“ _Hola, chica. Esta bien? Gringa. Que droga tomaste?_ ” Sabine turned to Melika and shrugged.

“I don’t think she speaks Spanish.”

Sabine turned and saw Melika looking like she’d seen a ghost. The blood was receding from Melika’s hearty, brown face, and she was getting deathly pale.

“Robin…” Melika saw Sabine looking at her in confusion. “That’s my Big. I haven’t seen her since she graduated. I didn’t… I didn’t know she could sing.” Melika said the last line with a confusion that Sabine knew was deeper than simply not being aware of someone else’s hobby, but Sabine didn’t feel she had time to explore the issue further.

“We should try to sober her up, huh?”

Melika nodded and was taking ginger steps forward to try and stir Robin from her trip when a man stepped out from the guest bedroom. It was Todd. It was the man from the elevator. He was in a black blazer over a white t-shirt and gray dress slacks. His hair was a picture perfect crew cut. He grabbed Robin’s hand and gave a minimal nod towards Sabine and then stopped when he saw Melika. After a moment’s pause, he collected himself and seemed to not have a concern in the world.

“It’s a trance. She’s working on a new incantation. Practicing that melody really zonks her out. Thanks for taking care of her… it’s been a long time, Melika.”

Without another word, the man closed his eyes, and he and Robin disappeared from the balcony, leaving nothing but sparkling emerald dust in their wake. Melika’s heart started racing.

“Sabine… we need to go.”

Sabine embraced Melika with a tight hug.

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of Severe Depression, Attempted Assault, and Drug Use

Robin Goldberg met Virgil Keller the night that she graduated from Hodges University.

Robin was wearing a royal purple one-piece bathing suit. She’d ordered the swimwear from the official Omikron Epsilon Delta merch catalogue. Robin didn’t like how most swimsuits looked on her pale skin, but dark purples brought out the chestnut in her hair. The collegiate gear felt appropriate since her Brothers and Sisters were the ones that had brought her out to celebrate in the first place.

That evening was Robin’s first trip to  _Jardin_ , Arsene’s temple of song, dance, and sex. Every evening at  _Jardin_ was different. Arsene — the club’s owner and manager — was not a fan of predictable, rote hedonism. They wanted a crowd that worshipped at the font of excess and lust. The expected was the antitheses of their brand of ethereal pleasure.  _Jardin_  had been a Pittsburgh institution for forty years because walking through its velvet-plushed doors was a guarantee that your inhibitions would dissolve. A night at  _Jardin_  was a promise that the evening’s carnality would consume you. The club was a decades old reminder that desire could be obtained. You just had to open yourself up to embracing your appetites.

 _Jardin_  throbbed in lavender and rose eternity. The nightclub’s walls were mirrored, and the mirrors had built in strobes. The lights were arranged as blooming, lush flowers. The night was just finding its own rhythm, and the lights embedded in the walls were creeping up to a frantic pace.  _Jardin_ ‘s ceiling and floor were also mirrored as were all sides of the elevated bar seating that crisscrossed the dance floor in a spider-web of reflection. Fractal, electric Kool-Aid lighting suffused every molecule of the room, and even  _Jardin_ ‘s most audiophilic and techno-competent regulars couldn’t figure out how Arsene got the lights to sync up just right with both the melody and rhythm of each song.

On  _Jardin_ ‘s more architecturally conventional evenings, a large dancefloor dominated the center of the club with a cozy, rotating bar in the center. Arsene liked to call the bar their Rosebud. Most of the lesbians that haunted the place called it “the Clit” instead. Arsene had never corrected them.

The evening that Robin started to fall in love with Virgil,  _Jardin_  had embraced an aquatic décor. The polyamorous, pansexual party traded in dresses and suits for speedos and bikinis… and less if you weren’t shy. Few were by the time they left  _Jard_ _in_. The dance floor had been replaced with sprawling hot tubs and more raised, glass walkways between the tubs. There were open areas of blanketed glass with pillows, lubricants, and prophylactics, of course.

The tubs were steaming. Between the mist and the reality-shifting light show, Robin’s slow descent into disassociation was, perhaps, understandable.

Robin looked down at the watch on her wrist. The timepiece had been her mother’s. It wasn’t even close to midnight yet.

Robin was standing thigh deep in the blissfully warm water of the northeast pool, and she was regretting her decision to come out. The water was rippling in syncopated rhythm to the music. The psychedelic pool was like treading in a spiritual projection of the 60s given life, but Robin couldn’t convince herself that this warmth or beauty or lust was something she was experiencing. All of her senses were as out of tune as if they were a bad radio reception of someone else’s memories. The only external stimuli that Robin couldn’t ignore was the bass thudding against her chest.

Before Robin lost her hearing, slipping gradually from partial loss when she was thirteen to total deafness before her sixteenth birthday, Robin had loved music. Music had been the only thing she’d liked at Temple. Robin had never felt God the way her parents or her Rabbi had promised she would. She prayed, she meditated, her essence screamed into the void, and nothing ever spoke back. There was, however, something about song.

Robin’s first substantive questions as a child were about music.

_How does it work? Why am I feeling this way? When will I be able to sing like that?_

The first and third questions were easy enough to resolve. Robin’s parents gave her books on the science of sound and music. Robin consumed music theory and taught herself proper vocal techniques. Her parents thought maybe they had a young Streisand on their hands. Their daughter had perfect pitch, and she wasn’t simply capable of mimicking the  _zimrah_  of her temple in Squirrel Hill; even as a child, Robin could move the most stoic worshipers in the synagogue to tears. She transmitted the joy and melancholy of spiritual song as if it was her divine calling.

Robin’s hearing, however, was long departed before she ever got an answer to her second question.

How did music make her feel the way it did? How was her voice so able to move others? By the time Robin was a teenager and her hearing was starting to vanish, answering those existential questions became one of the few things that mattered. Robin was accepting that it was a matter of time before this magic left her life for good. She wanted to know what was that missing spark between the sound waves and her eardrums. What was happening inside of Robin that made her feel like maybe she had a soul after all? What else was music touching in this profound of a way?

Then Robin’s hearing was entirely gone, and she was temporarily denied the answer she so desperately craved. Robin forced herself to be grateful for the brief moment she got to experience music as magic. As the only thing that ever came close to resembling God’s spiritual presence which she had always been promised.

Robin was unable to feel grateful at  _Jardin_. She saw Chad’s tongue tracing the lines of this week’s boyfriend’s abs. Robin watched as Chad’s tongue made almost imperceptible little flicks in time with the crash of the bass. Robin caught sight of Todd dealing to PittU kids that she didn’t recognize.

Robin was at Hodges. Todd was at PittU, but they ran in a lot of the same circles. It came with the territory of their shared skillsets. The PittU kids looked like they were having fun at least.

The only thought Robin could maintain was how much she wanted to be wrapped up in her blankets at home, asleep in her bed. She’d be just as warm and far more content, and there, at least, no one would expect her to pretend to be having a good time.

As that impulse to escape bounced around her mind and Robin was working up the willpower to ghost from the club, she felt a splash of water against her face. Robin’s life was about to change forever.

Robin turned and saw a man without pants, pulling himself out of the water. His shriveled, wet cock was rapidly receding into his body. Standing over the man, there was a woman in black, cotton trousers and a dark red button up shirt with an open collar. Robin thought the woman was maybe a couple years older than her. 25 at the oldest. She had wavy, dark brown hair that fell just above her shoulders, and there was a small clutch on a chain down at her hip, floating in the water.

Robin could see the belligerent nudist’s mouth stretch open in a rictus of rage as he screamed at his clothed attacker. The offended woman simply stared at him, but Robin could sense that this woman would curbstomp her nuisance into oblivion if she felt so inclined. The pale woman’s hands clenched tight enough to shatter the man’s testicles. Robin didn’t know how the woman wasn’t bleeding, the way her nails were digging into her palms. The man pulled back his fist and started to swing as two security guards in coordinated rose bathing suits grabbed him by the waist and dragged him out of the pool as he kicked and splashed in impotent futility.

The woman stood motionless in the pool as the man was ejected from the club. Robin couldn’t tell if the woman was breathing. She was perfectly still, but she hadn’t passed out so Robin assumed she at least wasn’t oxygen-starved.

Minutes after the man was gone,  _Jardin_ ‘s celebrants acted like nothing had happened. Chad was licking more than just his boyfriend’s abs. The PittU students were lifting water out of the pool and ritualistically bathing each other with an almost religious reverence. Todd must have sold them the good shit. There was a tall, muscular black woman in a baby blue bikini making out with a black man in jammies in a corner. The man was wearing sunglasses and he had a cane resting against a nearby wall. The woman in the trousers and the shirt — wearing more clothes than anyone else in  _Jardin_  — stood stock still without reaction to the desire and craving and wanton sex that surrounded her.

Robin started to worry the woman was having a PTSD incident. Robin was convinced her “Little” in OED was suffering from PTSD and had never figured out a way to broach the topic. Robin didn’t want to be nosy, but she was fond of Melika. She wanted to make sure that Melika was getting the help she clearly needed. Robin knew a thing or two about needing help when the world hurt you and took away everything that mattered.

No one else in the club was paying any attention to this woman who had been forced to violence to defend herself from a drugged loon’s lascivious and predatory advances. Robin needed to know that this woman was okay.

Robin steeled up her nerves. She hated approaching strangers in public. She was very sensitive about her voice. Robin could still speak, but she had seen too many teen boys in the workshops of her education classes, snickering when she lectured. It wasn’t so much that she cared what these boys thought although Robin would admit it bothered her more than she ever let on. What really upset Robin was that she could never hear herself sing again. Speaking was a reminder of the void that her own voice had become.

After securing her heartbeat, Robin waded the short distance across the pool. It was only ten feet, but Robin felt more anticipation and anxiety than when she’d crossed the stage at her graduation earlier in the day. Robin situated herself in front of the woman who did not react to her presence. Robin looked at her more closely. There was a thin, jagged scar around her neck, and Robin was more certain of her PTSD diagnosis than ever.

There was a brief pause in the music. The bass had ceased its rattling of Robin’s chest, and the only ripples in the pool were caused by  _Jardin_ ‘s clientele. Robin finally forced herself to speak.

“Are you okay?”

The woman finally stirred and studied Robin. She nodded her head silently. The woman almost walked away and then looked back at Robin and signed, “I’ll be fine.”

Robin was stunned. It was rare that she ran into folks outside of her special education courses that used ASL. Robin wondered if this woman was deaf and was reading her lips. Maybe she could hear but knew Robin was deaf because of her voice and this woman knew ASL instead because of a family member or a friend that was hearing impaired.

Robin signed, “I can read lips if you feel more comfortable talking.”

The woman gestured to her lips. “I can hear fine; I’m mute.”

There had been a handful of mute children in Robin’s first ASL classes before she started going to the Pittsburgh School for the Deaf full time. Those children had been so much younger than her. Even the four year olds picked up sign language so much faster than Robin did. Robin could tell by this woman’s unsteady signs that she had also picked up ASL later in life, but Robin suspected this woman’s ASL lessons had come even later in life than hers.

“Can I buy you a drink? I figure you could use one, and I could use the conversation.”

The woman studied Robin more closely, and Robin returned the favor. The woman’s eyes were a pale green. Her skin was almost alabaster and made Robin look like she had a tan. The scar looked fresh. Whatever had happened to this woman had happened recently.

Of the many things Robin was wrong about that evening, that was, perhaps, her most comical mis-assessment.

The woman was so thin that she almost looked undernourished. Beneath her eyes, there were dark circles. Robin wondered if this woman was getting any sleep at all.

Robin’s instincts were at least right there. The woman didn’t need to sleep though so Robin’s concerns were misplaced.

“I don’t drink, but I’d love to talk.”

The woman reached out her hand to Robin. “My name is Virgil, by the way. Virgil Keller.”

Robin reached out and shook Virgil’s hand. “Robin Goldberg.” Virgil’s hand was cold. Robin didn’t know how that was possible. It was warmer than a Turkish bath house in  _Jardin_ , but Robin chalked up Virgil’s chilly palms to poor circulation.

Robin and Virgil made their way up to one of  _Jardin_ ‘s elevated walkways which were deserted. Almost everyone else in the club that evening preferred the balmy embrace of the pools and the lower level. The pair sat at their table until last call. Virgil was the best “listener” Robin had met since she was in elementary school. Robin’s hands were a whirl as she told her life story to Virgil.

How complications from her juvenile diabetes took her hearing. How she’d had to give up her dreams of being a singer. How she’d discovered film and theatre afterwards. Going to Hodges. Deciding that she wanted to teach theatre to other deaf teenagers at her old high school. Her hopes of still making independent films even as she taught.

Robin promised to show Virgil one of her student films some day. Robin’s favorite was about a lesbian couple who worked in the Oakes Steel mills during the second World War. Virgil let Robin go on and on the whole evening, but when Robin brought up that specific film, Virgil finally piped up with little anecdotes about the lives of the Rosies of the city. How hellishly hot it was in the mills and the light fabric they had to wear… that they still stained with sweat ten minutes into every shift. The Polish women that sold pierogis on lunch breaks. There was rationing of course, but folks had ways around that, and the  _sauerkraut_ and mushrooms and cheese got you through the day. How the women with their husbands’ cars would help drive home the workers who were single or whose husbands hadn’t owned a car before they left for the war.

Robin asked Virgil how she knew so much. Virgil signed that she had studied history in college and had specialized in women’s work during the war. Virgil chose her signs carefully during that explanation, and Robin wondered what this woman was keeping from her. However, Robin’s instincts had never been to pry.

After  _Jardin_  shut down and the club’s amorous, exhausted dilettantes shuffled into cabs and buses, Robin and Virgil walked the Strip until the sun rose over the Three Rivers. They were holding hands as they walked, and neither was sure of the exact moment their hands clasped. Robin still couldn’t believe how cold Virgil’s hands were, but Robin was also discovering that Virgil’s hands possessed an excited curiosity. Virgil’s fingers would lightly caress Robin’s wrist and her palm. Virgil looked at Robin and took in everything she had to say. Robin felt seen and heard as a person — and not just as a student or a teacher or an artist — for the first time since she was a child.

Robin and Virgil said goodbye at six in the morning at the bus stop to Squirrel Hill. Robin tried to give Virgil her cell phone number.

“I’m a little too old-fashioned for a cell phone.”

Considering Virgil was dressed like Katharine Hepburn or Irene Dunne, Robin didn’t have it in her to put up too much of an argument. Virgil promised that she’d be back at  _Jardin_  two nights from now. Robin said she’d stop by and say hello. She didn’t want to tell Virgil how much she was already starting to like her. Robin wanted to play it cool.

Robin heard Virgil’s voice two days later, walking back to her apartment from her local bodega in Squirrel Hill. Robin was about to start getting ready for what she was already mentally calling her second date with Virgil. Instead, Robin found out exactly what Virgil had been hiding that first evening they met, and the fact that Virgil could speak was the least shocking revelation.


	3. Not Quite Midnight in the Jardin of Arsene and Virgil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of attempted abduction, drug use, and graphic violence.

Stuttering percussion and icy synths reverberated across the surging dance floor, and  _Jardin_ ‘s swelling patronage was being swept up in the triphop’s intoxicating physicality. It was foreplay, and every dancer measured their calculations.

The shuffling, arrhythmic beats pulsing through the bar sent waves of color that folded in on themselves and back out, unfurling and blooming, each permutation an aftershock of the endless reflections.

From her high bar stool, just off the disco’s center, on a little diamond of the labyrinthine, elevated walkway, Virgil scanned the club for familiar faces.

There was a man Virgil thought she recognized near the restrooms. Virgil didn’t know his name. The man was in his late 20s, and Virgil realized it had been years since she’d seen him. There was a long scar on the side of his face she hadn’t seen before, and the man had gained almost thirty pounds. However, Virgil recognized his square jaw, and she hadn’t seen someone wear a blazer like that in a disco since the 80s. A blazer, shirt, and slacks weren’t the fashion of choice anymore although Virgil was starting to realize she wasn’t quite sure what fashion was these days.

Virgil had watched the man deal ecstasy in a handful of clubs downtown and on the Strip, but Virgil wasn’t sure how long she’d been gone or what this man was dealing now, if anything. Virgil had never had need of his pharmaceutical services.

She had seen an OD or two in her day. Heroin in the 60s. Coke in the 70s and 80s. Heroin again in the 90s. Ecstasy in the aughts. Virgil wondered what the kids were into now… and when now was. Virgil would have been in for quite the shock if someone had told her that heroin was making another comeback.

In the southeastern corner of the dance floor, a tall, muscular black woman in a sparkling strapless dress danced with a stout Dominican woman in a tank top and jorts. The taller woman had a penchant for picking up her much smaller dance partner and twirling her. The sturdier of the two giggled and rested her head against her escort’s stomach. The tall woman rubbed her partner’s back and then kissed her head. The pair started dancing, and the black woman clasped her lover’s back against her chest and swayed.

_Jardin_ ‘s proprietor, Arsene, was chatting with a young black man in sunglasses that Virgil also recognized… and not without a certain amount of distress. The pair were sitting at the central bar. Arsene was in their favorite outfit. Their tight, white sweater was a willing canvas for the club’s kaleidoscopic streams of color, and their black, knit cotton skirt reflected a thin, shifting flower bed of its own. Any time Arsene was on the dance floor — and the Laotian disco magnate’s appearances were becoming increasingly rare — the less sober patrons of  _Jardin_ would swear Arsene’s head was manifesting from an explosion of pure color. Virgil reckoned that sight was the closest she’d ever get to a drug trip.

Virgil bent over across her empty table to study the man in the sunglasses. His name was Elijah. Virgil thought that Elijah and the black woman she’d watched dance knew each other, but she wasn’t confident in that observation. It always took Virgil a little bit of time for her memories to come back.

Elijah had a long cane, resting against the Rosebud. The cane’s gold handle pulsed in tune with the club’s atmospheric pyrotechnics. Arsene offered their hand to Elijah. Elijah shook Arsene’s hand, and they started to walk towards the club’s rear. Elijah used his cane to guide his path.

Virgil lost track of time. If anyone on the dance floor had looked up at her, they would have seen her sitting stock still, looking out on the dance floor, focusing on nothing. Virgil was in her black, cotton trousers and dark red button up shirt with the open collar. Her wavy, dark brown hair fell just above her shoulders. Her clutch sat on the table. There were no drinks. Virgil didn’t drink.

By the time Virgil stirred again,  _Jardin_  was at capacity. It was just past eleven and the avant-garde of Pittsburgh’s dance caste were hip-to-hip on the dance floor. Virgil was stirred from her catatonia by the discordant buzz of electronic whirrs. She was whisked away from a daydream of her last shift at the Oakes Mills’ northern foundry. Virgil was a fan of dance music that captured the horror and madness of industrial decay. It felt apt.

Bodies churned on the dance floor. The nightly bacchanal had arrived. Virgil watched two men without clothes grind against the walls, the more svelte of the pair swiftly stroking his otter’s sex. A tangled knot of men, women, and everyone between and outside of that false dichotomy had formed an undulating blur of hands, tongues, and skin in another corner of the disco. On a separate lane of the elevated walkway, separated from Virgil by a chasm of color and bass, a heterosexual couple were in the throes of their own love-making. The woman was on top, riding her partner who was splayed across their table. The man’s jeans were wrapped around his ankles, and the woman’s shirt had long since been tossed into the frenzied crowd.

Virgil was moments away from leaving her table and making her way to the orgiastic center of the evening when a woman stumbling towards the bar caught her eye. A mere drunk wouldn’t have been enough to grab Virgil’s attention, but this woman was bouncing off of the exultant revelers occupying the crowded disco. The woman was reeling around like she didn’t see anyone around her although she was also making an unmistakable track towards the Rosebud. The woman was wearing an off-the-shoulders black dress, and her hair fell in light curls down her back.

After the woman made it to the bar — moments after she was hip-checked by a woman with her face buried in the crotch of another woman who was being held in the air by a man she was furiously necking — the stumbler attempted to take a seat but fell off her bar stool instead. As the woman started to pick herself up, Virgil realized  _Jardin_ ‘s most inebriated spectacle was Robin and that Virgil had been away so much longer than she had ever considered.

Virgil was out of her chair and heading to the nearest stairwell to the dance floor before Robin was back on her feet. A bearded man in a trelby at the table closest to the stairwell whistled at Virgil and yelled a lewd come on. Virgil didn’t acknowledge his existence. She did not have a habit of suffering the presence of rude men, but Virgil had bigger worries. Before the evening was over, her cat-caller knew how lucky he was that he hadn’t garnered Virgil’s attention.

Cutting across the dance floor as  _Jardin_ ‘s sexual congress inched towards its climax was no easy feat. The dance floor was limbs splayed in ecstasy, bodies rolling against and over one another, pelvic thrusts and hips grinding. Virgil waded through the orgasmic entropy. Couples and triads and larger, uncountable groupings would reach for her and attempt to draw her into their fornication, and on any other night, Virgil may have joined. However, that night, Virgil did not stop until she reached the Rosebud.

By the time Virgil made it to her destination, she found Robin sitting upright, if not entirely steadily. The Clit was otherwise empty except for the bartender who seemed unaffected by the lustful energy coursing through  _Jardin_. As Virgil sat down on the stool next to Robin, the music briefly stopped, and Virgil could hear Robin singing.

Virgil had spent a not insignificant portion of her afterlife in nightclubs. From big band and swing to rock & roll and soul to punk and grunge to electronica and hip-hop, Virgil was intimately acquainted with popular music. She hadn’t seen a film since her death in 1944, but Virgil knew the music that was played at clubs and had marked the progression of time with the changes in those tunes. Virgil had never heard anything like Robin’s melody, and it was all the more confusing because she knew Robin could not sing.

Virgil had been at  _Jardin_  one evening in the 90s when Arsene had hosted a tantric sex experience. The New Age vocals that had been twisting through the club’s speakers were the closest comparison Virgil had, and she knew that wasn’t close to describing what Robin was singing. Robin’s voice sounded like it was coming to Virgil from another plane, and the other planes of being were something with which Virgil had a more than passing acquaintance. Robin’s voice and its powerful crescendos and heart-stopping plummets took a deep hold of Virgil, and Virgil thought, for a moment, she was going to simply fade away. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

_Jardin_ ‘s skittering, percussive dance beats returned, and Robin closed her mouth and stopped singing. Before Virgil could reach out to touch her friend, Robin turned and smiled at Virgil, but Virgil quickly realized Robin wasn’t truly smiling at Virgil or even looking at her. Robin was smiling through Virgil and looking through her, and Virgil knew she was too solid to be looked through just then. Robin’s pupils were the size of hubcaps, and Virgil was starting to realize how much older Robin looked when Robin lifted her hands and began to sign.

“Walk with me.”

Robin looked at Virgil, and Robin continued to smile blankly past her. Somebody must have drugged Robin. That was all Virgil could think. If Virgil found whoever had roofied Robin, she… Virgil didn’t want to think about what she would do. Virgil needed to get Robin somewhere safe where she could sober up in peace, and Virgil had so many questions and so many apologies once Robin was straight.

“Sure… Robin, where are we going?”

“Somewhere more quiet.” Robin burst out in laughter at her own joke.

Robin grabbed Virgil’s hand and led her to the back of the club. Robin was singing again, and Virgil was too fixated on Robin’s voice to notice the club parting before the two of them as they walked towards the back.  _Jardin_ ‘s music was so loud that Virgil could feel the rhythm in her spine… which had no right to have any feeling. Virgil died in a car accident that shattered her neck and her spine, but being dead and walking around anyways had a way of making biology cease to make sense. Yet, Virgil could still hear Robin’s song. She could feel it on her skin and in her head. The melody was inside of her. Virgil was sprouting up through the earth. She could feel her skin exploding in petals and green.

Virgil shook her head violently, and she was back in reality and  _Jardin_. She and Robin had just reached the back door that led up to the club’s backstage.

“Where are you taking me?”

Robin stopped in her tracks and smiled at Virgil. Virgil thought Robin looked more alert, but her pupils were still dilated and Robin still had that same glazed smile. Virgil was desperate to get her out of  _Jardin_.

“Under the eaves and under the boughs, where only the angels tread.”

Robin stopped smiling and her face was a model of seriousness. Virgil’s heart would have stopped beating if it still pumped blood.

“Okay…”

Virgil had made up her mind to start dragging Robin out of the club’s main entrance and to put Robin in a cab to Squirrel Hill — if that was even where Robin was still living — when the drug dealer in the blazer with the scar on his face started crossing the dance floor. He was making a beeline for Robin. Just as Virgil began to wonder if this was the man who had drugged her friend, the dealer reached the two of them and grabbed Robin’s hand. He started to sign at her with his free hand.

“There you are! Where have you been? You had me worried sick. I’m taking you home right now.”

The man in the blazer turned towards Virgil and, with a look of thinly veiled contempt, spoke out loud.

“Who are you? Do I know you?”

Virgil didn’t respond and just stared at the man. The man shook his head impatiently and then signed the same question back to Virgil who responded only with his initial question signed in return.

“I’m her boyfriend. We’re leaving now.”

After responding, the man began to drag Robin away by her arm until Virgil reached out reflexively and grabbed the man’s other wrist.

“What the fuck are you doing?” The man asked the question as he fought back whimpers of pain.

“Let her go,” Virgil signed. “She’s not going anywhere with you.”

Virgil squeezed the man’s wrist tighter, and he stared at her in disbelief and agony.

The man tried to wrest his wrist away from Virgil one last time, and Virgil blacked out. She thought of her father grabbing her by the arm. She thought of all of the men who had tried to grab her in clubs and on the streets over the last 80 years. Virgil felt the anger flowing through her, and, when she came back to, moments later, the man was screaming in agony. Virgil held the shattered remains of his wrist in her clenched hands.

Robin signed at the man, “Todd?” in sincere concern.

Virgil could feel the eyes of the club turning her way.  _Jardin_ ‘s coital conglomerations had come to a screeching halt, and everyone in the club in their various states of undress, intercourse, and orgasm were looking at Virgil and Robin as well as Todd’s mangled wrist. Todd had let go of Robin’s hand and held his wrist as he screamed in fury and pain.

Virgil felt time slowing around her. That wasn’t usually what happened. Virgil was so used to blinking and then weeks and months would race past before she opened her eyes again. Now, time was coming to a crawl. Robin was paralyzed with concern for Todd. The partiers were starting to turn in mass and gather towards the corner. Virgil was trapped or would have been if things like walls had been any impediment since her death.

Virgil let her body fade away. It wasn’t difficult. Staying material was the hard part. Virgil let the tension of physical existence run off of her, and, in a blink, she was gone. To the crowd, where the woman in the vintage clothes had been — looking like a Lawrenceville hipster experiencing a violent breakdown — there was now empty air.

Virgil’s view back on that crowd had changed more dramatically.  _Jardin_  and its patrons had been bathed in the phantasmagoric, flittering rainbow of the club’s lights. That color was now muted and dull, like paint that had dried in an overeager sun for decades. Virgil’s eyesight was perfect. Her vision was better than it had been when she was alive. Before Virgil stepped back behind the veil, she could see the frayed stitching in Todd’s blazer. She could see the old stains of sweat on his white shirt. Once Virgil blinked out of the physical world, the fine details of  _Jardin_ blurred like a child’s watercolor drawn in the dark. The afterlife was a muddy blur, and Virgil hated its vague ambiguity.

Without thinking, Virgil reached out and grabbed Robin by the arm and dragged her across the border of the separate worlds they truly inhabited.

Virgil had never done this before. She had no idea if Robin could follow her home, but she couldn’t leave Robin behind if she didn’t have to. Virgil had no idea what Todd was capable of or what he wanted from Robin. Virgil knew she wanted Robin as far away from this man as she could get her. When Virgil grabbed Robin’s arm, Virgil didn’t feel the physical sensation of touch. She didn’t feel the warmth of Robin’s skin or the short bristles of her thin, brown arm hair. Virgil’s core was consumed by Robin’s song.

Every part of Virgil’s being became intertwined with that melody, and Virgil would have stopped and listened to that song for hours, but she didn’t have hours. She still had enough sense of herself and the world around her to know that she had to go. Virgil counted her blessings for still possessing the awareness to know that if she stayed immaterial too long, she’d dissolve. She had no idea when she’d return.

The crowd gasped and screamed as Robin disappeared as well. Virgil knew the mess she had caused and all of the people she’d have to answer to, but she didn’t have time to worry about anything except getting Robin out of this club. Virgil could deal with the repercussions of this showy display later. She  had Robin by her hands and the pair ran through Virgil’s realm and passed through the walls to the club’s rear like they weren’t even there. Virgil knew that as far as she was concerned, the wall didn’t exist.

Virgil and Robin were in a narrow corridor behind the dance floor. There was a fire exit to the left. Virgil could feel herself coming apart at the seams. It felt like her consciousness had been poured into a roaring ocean, and Virgil’s sense of herself was drifting apart in a thousand pieces in a thousand directions. She couldn’t believe how quickly this was happening. Was it the effort of bringing Robin with her? Virgil wasn’t sure but she figured if this was wrecking her, she could only imagine what it was doing to Robin.

Virgil stopped in the corridor and gathered herself back together. The world returned in clarity. The corridor was lit in harsh fluorescents, and its brick walls and linoleum floors were spotless underneath the humming light. Robin was back in the physical world as well, and Virgil was about to lead her out the fire exit when a deep, booming voice echoed behind her.

“It is rare for spirits to visit my club. I suspect we may have much to discuss, little ghost.”

Virgil’s head turned on a swivel, and at the opposite end of the corridor, Arsene stood with their arms across their chest.


	4. Homes and Self-Portraits

Sabine hated the glad-handing of big gallery shows. They hadn’t sold a piece in over a month, and their rent was due in two weeks. Sabine was happy to have one of their works at Terre for the 2018 Pittsburgh Art Crawl. They had begged and pleaded with Severin for a spot. They were not, under any circumstances, asking their mother to help cover the rent… again. Sabine was a grown ass adult. They were a working artist. Their work could pay the bills.

Or, at least, that’s what Sabine told themself each day as they pushed aside the rational impulse to find a job with benefits and a salary.  
Sabine never knew what to say to the other artists at these exhibitions. They would read Artist Statements and wonder if some of their peers would have been better served pursuing careers as essayists (or, occasionally, as novelists) instead of visual artists.

Look around you, and you see the base and superstructure. The McDonald Financial Building and Rosen Chemicals. Across town, we have the Hazelwood projects. Across the bridge, there’s Southside. It isn’t enough to say there are rich people. There are poor people. What holds the megarich up and holds the infinite poor down? What keeps the working class from rising up en masse to take back this city? Each of these five columns represents…

Sabine couldn’t help but make the jerk off motion as they walked by Colin’s installation, a series of five papier-mache columns in the center of Terre‘s main show floor. The erections were modeled after classical Greek columns, and the papier-mache might have been mistaken for actual marble if you didn’t know what to look for. Colin’s work always had a hyper-realistic look, even if it was ultimately as hollow and empty as his prose.

Sabine agreed with everything Colin’s artist statement said. Of course, the evils of capitalism were more complex than Rich People Bad, Poor People Good… although those were both certainly mostly true statements. But who the fuck was this piece supposed to be for? Did Colin think he was going to inspire some genuine Bolshie revolt with a PoMo commentary on bourgeois collaboration. The proletariat already knew this shit and didn’t need a trust fund case like Colin to remind them.

Sabine knew they were a terrible hypocrite. They didn’t have a trust fund, but their mother, Paulina Almeida, was the top prosecutor in Alleghany County. Also, Sabine’s favorite evening at Terre had been the night of the centennial of the October Revolution. There had been installations celebrating Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Severin had given into counter-revolutionary demands and not placed any explicitly pro-Stalinist art in the gallery, although everyone knew that Severin had their sympathies with the Georgian Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. Someone had built a desk with a realistically detailed model cat that you could sit next to and pet like Lenin in his famous post-revolution photograph. There were Tsars and Tsarinas and their children that you could hang. The patrons of Terre that evening had sung the Internationale… Severin included.

Nazi punks had tried to sneak in, and Sabine had helped beat their asses out the door. Sabine wore steel toes that evening, and they heard the satisfying crack of their boot against a fascist’s jaw in an alley outside the gallery. Sabine hooked up with a comrade from out of state that night who gave them the best head they’d ever had.

All in all, it was a good evening.

Sabine understood, however, that there was a difference between a night for comrades who knew the argot and running something like these columns as the centerpiece on Art Crawl night when half the crowd in Terre were tourists from the Burgh ‘burbs who had never heard the phrase “material dialectics” in their life. Terre was the space for experimental art in Pittsburgh. Sabine knew getting a spot on the Terre floor during the Art Crawl was the biggest opportunity they’d have this side of Tracy finally getting Sabine that spot at a Hodges Exhibition. Tracy had been promising them a placement for years now. However, Sabine couldn’t stomach the inflated self-importance of art bros like Colin and the utter, unapologetic inaccessibility of their “radical” and “political” art.

Steel built the Pittsburgh we know, but where has it gone now? What has replaced it? Circuit boards and information technology. Dance clubs and themed bars? Picture the Hodges Refinery. The roaring ovens and the molten steel. The workers drenched in sweat. The roads and railways and buildings that transformed 20th century America from this town? What has ever been given back to us?

Sabine actually liked this piece. It was a garish, brutalist conglomeration of steel. Girders and railings arrayed in chaotic precision. The instillation was in one of Terre‘s cramped, skewed corners. If you stepped beneath the haphazard steel edifice, pressure pads on the floor bathed you in reds and oranges and blinding whites and blues. Snatches of early 20th century folk music played from hidden speakers, and based on your position, the tracks would warp and hiss and rewind and scratch. Sabine closed their eyes and imagined the steel mills and felt with their feet around this immaculately nauseating piece. Sabine thought of Virgil.

They wondered how she was doing. It had been nine years since Sabine had seen Virgil. What must it have been like to be one of the women in those mills? How different was the city with so many of the men gone? How much better was it? Sabine thought they could handle the backbreaking labor as long as there were fewer men around that could harass or abuse them. Sabine supposed they would have been just as happy in Europe killing Nazis. Either option worked.

Self-portrait.

Severin’s piece stood in a lonely corner of the gallery. It was ignored for the more high-concept and interactive pieces that sprinkled Terre. Sabine wondered if anyone in the gallery besides they and Melika knew how literal the piece’s title was.

Severin and Sabine had the only watercolors at the show. Colin had once told Sabine how impressed he was that she still worked in watercolor. He loved how quaint of a choice watercolors were. Sabine didn’t know if they wanted to throat punch Colin more because of how condescending his voice was when he said the word “quaint” or because of how many times they’d told Colin their pronouns. He was still misgendering them either through laziness or malice. Sabine didn’t care which it was.

Severin’s painting was nearly ten feet tall and showed a nude figure. The creature wasn’t human although it appeared humanoid. The being was bipedal. There were almost recognizable facial features although the ears were jagged and higher up on the head than a person’s. The nose was convex instead of external, and the eyes were perfectly round with no discernible lids. The skin breathed in and out, colors exhaling into lighter hues, parallel hues, shadows of themselves against shifting, complex geometrical curves. The creature had a perfectly flat chest with no nipples, but it had a recognizable vagina with an oversized clitoral hood. The dominating color scheme of the ever-changing skin were dark, almost midnight blues against small patches of polygonal, bumblebee yellow.

Beneath Severin’s terse artist statement, there was a plaque explaining how this piece was made possible with experimental breakthroughs in the Hodges University chemistry department collaborating with the arts school.

The plaque was total horseshit. Hodges was the legal face of the Divise market and had started to make a massive profit off of the exclusive rights to external distribution of Fae goods. Virgil’s painting had the same plaque. Like Severin, they were able to circumvent Hodges for supply. Also like Severin, they were not able or willing to flaunt where this paint really came from in public.

Home.

Wherever Sabine stood in Terre, they were strategically placed so that they could easily sneak a glance towards their own piece. Two teenage girls holding hands had stopped and stared at the painting for a couple minutes. One of the girls, a portly Persian sixteen year old, kissed her Jewish partner, and then they walked over to the Lynchian horrors of the steel/folk music instillation. No one had looked like a serious buyer all night.

Sabine’s piece was a landscape. Home was the first landscape Terre had featured in seven months, and Severin had only agreed to even consider a landscape when Sabine showed them which landscape they had chosen.

A sea of flowers cascaded towards a crashing, cellular horizon. From a distance, the fiery field was a balletic explosion of reds and oranges. The roses, lilies, and orchids. The sky smoldered. Purples and blacks. The sky seemed to fall inward. At the center of the field, the lone, lilac orchid. Pale as a teardrop.

Closer examinations of the painting revealed surrealist, almost eldritch flourishes. The brick red lily seeping verdant ooze. Its pistil pushing out of the flower like a lolling tongue. The crystalline lavender rose. The pulsing suns in its glass petals. Orchids with vulval tendrils, furiously intertwined with one another. Grass that grew and withdrew in skeletal, silver waves.

Tracy Houston was studying a particularly detailed blade of skeleton grass when Sabine walked silently beside her. Tracy was in her “I’m just a customer” outfit although every featured artist in Terre had spotted Tracy before the doors had shut behind her. They all wanted her to look at their work. Tracy was in an ankle-length, royal purple dress with silver trim that seemed to almost glow against her coffee arms and thighs. She was wearing a light, rose scarf. Sabine wished they had Tracy’s horned rims. Sabine looked down at their jeans and the Mitski tour shirt they were wearing. They hoped they could still nail an ensemble like Tracy’s when they were in their sixties.

Tracy slowly pulled away from the painting and her deep, brown eyes turned, brows raised to Sabine.

“Who is this for?”

“It is for me.”

Severin seemed to materialize on Sabine’s other side. Sabine had often wondered if Severin could teleport, but Sabine was pretty sure they’d seen Severin hobnobbing in their dark red tuxedo with the Cochran family whose donations kept Terre open. Severin’s long, blonde hair bounced as they pretended to laugh at another one of Bobby Cochran’s anecdotes about his great aunt Helen. Severin had at least been in the room.

Tracy looked at Severin over her horned rims.

“You like this?”

Severin studied Sabine’s painting several times before responding.

“It’s kitsch. Sorry… Sabine, but that’s what it is.”

Severin wiped a tear from their eye.

“Still, it is home.”

Tracy sighed loudly.

“When did you get boring, Sabine?”

Tracy wasn’t even deigning to look at them.

Sabine was so short that they had difficult maintaining eye contact with most people. It was a disadvantage of being 4’11”. They were grateful now for the advantage their miniscule height offered. Sabine just stared ahead at their painting and tried to add a playful edge to their voice, but they weren’t sure if they sounded relaxed or menacing.

“First, fuck you. I’m not boring. Second, it’s pretty. People like pretty. Pretty pays the bills.”

Sabine steeled up their nerve and looked up at Tracy who did not break Sabine’s gaze. Sabine tended to have that effect on people. Severin and Arsene too.

“We both know there are some gringas down in Oakland that would eat this shit up if they have some assurances of its authenticity. Which… fuck it. Whatever you need. But those girls would pay through the nose for this.”

Tracy looked back at Sabine’s painting and wrinkled her nose in thinly veiled disdain.

“Yeah… Ansel’s daughter is obsessed with you people. We could probably bleed her for…” Tracy started to do mental calculations and tilted her head with a detached gaze. “Two or three grand. Yeah. I think that’s a mighty fine idea.”

Tracy clapped Sabine on the back.

“I respect the grind, little s… sorry. Little friend. We all have to eat, but try to find a way to get paid and still care. You’re better than this.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of gaslighting, psychological abuse, drug use, violence, queerphobic language and queerphobic violence

Melika had her first undeniable prophecy the fall semester of her sophomore year at Hodges.

She had just started telling her closest friends that she was a woman. Melika was wearing makeup to queer bars. She was finding dresses and women’s formal wear that she felt comfortable in. Melika didn’t know if she’d ever be able to afford hormones or surgery, but she was going to exist as a woman and do so outside of the confines of her own head.

Melika had gone to  _Jardin_  earlier in the evening. She had heard the rumors about the club, and Melika wanted to explore those lustful impulses for herself. She craved that physical vulnerability and passion. As Melika prowled the dance floor, she received invitations to the multitudes of sexual congress. Queer women and femme-leaning genderqueers waved beckoning fingers and stole hungry glances, but, after an hour, Melika was sitting at the Rosebud, sipping a screwdriver, and trying not to cry.

“It’s not for everybody.”

Melika turned and Todd was sitting on the stool next to her, stirring a gin and tonic with his straw.

Todd was in his trademark shirt and blazer. In the years to come, when Robin was sober enough around Todd to function, she often wondered if he actually owned any other outfits. Todd did his best to ensure Robin was rarely sober.

“I’m sorry?”

Melika’s heart was racing. Todd was looking her right in the eyes. He was smiling like he’d just seen the most beautiful woman in the room. Todd’s smile danced. He wasn’t staring at Melika quizzically; Todd was soaking her in.

Todd’s eyes glistened at the question. “This place. I mean, it’s fun. It’s why I’m here… but all of that,” Todd gestured to the writhing bodies on the dance floor, “it can be kind of a lot.”

Melika started to nod. “Right? I don’t know these people. How am I supposed to feel comfortable enough to relax or enjoy myself? Maybe I’m not cut out for orgies.”

“I think I can help you out there.”

Todd pulled a small baggie out of his blazer pocket. The baggie contained a dozen sugar petals that pulsed with a coral glow.

“I don’t know that this will make you an orgy person, but it should help you relax.”

Melika wasn’t a stranger to drugs. She’d accepted she was trans twelve hours into a twenty four hour acid trip. Melika smoked grass every weekend, but she had never seen a drug that glowed of its own accord before.

“What is this?”

“Orchid.”

“Cute name.”

Todd opened the baggie and removed two petals. He put one in his mouth and placed the other on a napkin and pushed it towards Melika.

“Orchid will make your whole body spark and open your mind up to the universe.”

Melika rolled her eyes. “I’ve done Molly. This isn’t my first candy flip.”

“This isn’t Molly. Orchid makes Molly feel like caffeine and acid like a dream.”

Melika stared at the petal with a thirst that didn’t disappear when caution occasionally reared its head.

“How much you want for it?”

Todd waved his hand at Melika dismissively.

“Your money’s no good here.” Todd’s face was transformed by a wolfish grin. “How about one dance? I could be convinced to part with my product for one dance with a beautiful woman.”

Melika blushed and had to momentarily look away. When she returned Todd’s gaze, Melika blazed a confidence she hadn’t known she possessed. There was arousal and anticipation etched into her face. Melika extended her hand in offer to Todd.

“Deal.”

Todd reached out and gripped Melika’s hand with a firm but tender grasp. She felt the handshake in the soles of her feet. Melika broke the grip and winked at Todd as she snatched the petal and popped it into her mouth. Melika grabbed Todd’s hand and dragged him onto the dance floor. Melika was a foot taller than Todd and nearly lifted him off the ground on more than one occasion as she took him to their little corner of  _Jardin_ ‘s chapel of dance.

Melika and Todd danced for more than the negotiated single song. The Orchid hit Melika much faster than she’d expected. The first song hadn’t even ended before Melika felt a presence creeping down her spine. The sensation was akin to a finger caressing every neuron in Melika’s back at once. When Todd placed his hand on her hips, Melika felt every sexual impulse in her body wake up. Melika was hard before she realized what was happening, and no amount of mentally reciting cricket statistics was enough to make her sex go back to sleep. Melika felt like Todd had reached inside of her being through her hips and was softly massaging her very essence until she felt awake and alive in a way she hadn’t thought possible in years.

Melika and Todd danced for two hours before they finally kissed. Melika’s hands explored Todd’s face and shoulder and back and chest. Her yearnings were earnest and eager and unapologetic. Todd responded to Melika’s touch with quiet shivers and reflexive moans. His fingers were nearly as dexterous as hers. Todd traced Melika’s arms, his ghostly touch evoking memories of old lovers that she had never known.

Melika leaned in to kiss Todd because she couldn’t imagine the night not reaching that marker. He pressed his hands against the small of her back and gathered her in a tight embrace. When the pair pulled apart from the kiss, Melika was so lightheaded that she stumbled and found herself short of breath.

_Is this what I’ve been missing_?

Todd invited Melika back to the PittU dorm where he worked and lived as an RA. He was a senior at Pittsburgh University and worked at Thibodeaux Estates #3. The Thibodeaux Estates dorm complex was a dizzying grid of 40 story tower dorm apartments for PittU students. Todd was one of the two RAs for the twenty-fourth floor of Thibodeaux #3. Melika had assumed Todd was just a student, dealing to make a couple extra bucks. She hadn’t considered what the rest of his life would be like.

Todd broached the topic of going back to his place by asking if Melika wanted to listen to some records and just talk. She didn’t want to presume where she thought the evening was heading, but Melika was immensely grateful for the hint of possibility and if nothing happened but a talk and music, those were wonderful nightcaps in their own right.

Todd and Melika took the drunk bus back to Thibodeaux. They talked the entire ride back to Oakland from the Strip. Melika was falling fast. Todd was inviting her to a meeting for a group of socialist activists he was involved with. Melika and Todd were both higher than a kite on Christmas day, but she tried to catch every word about how Todd’s friends didn’t front politicians in  _bourgeois_  capitalist elections like those bootlickers in the DSA. They focused on grassroots community organization with an internationalist perspective. Melika figured Todd was a red. She knew plenty of  _desi_  kids on campus that were.

Melika was about half right when it came to Todd’s leanings.

He wouldn’t let up about how much everyone in his group would love her. Melika understood that Todd was one of those people that had to live his beliefs. He wasn’t just going to talk about change. Melika was so tired of all of the neolib talkers at Hodges. Here was a man that was living theory and praxis, and he still knew how to have a good time to boot.

Melika hadn’t said she was trans out loud to Todd, but she couldn’t see how Todd wouldn’t know. Melika wasn’t on hormones. Her erection had brushed Todd’s side when he’d first touched her hips. Yet, he had never said or done anything to make Melika feel like she wasn’t the beautiful and alluring woman that she was. Melika was intoxicated on the ease of her connection and the otherworldly drug she had voluntarily ingested. The Orchid was still coursing through her system, and Melika couldn’t believe how exultantly alive she still felt while maintaining a clarity of her feelings and her surroundings. Melika believed she could do anything. She could conquer any fear, work past any trauma.

Melika’s confidence was tragically misplaced.

Her magical evening began to fall apart when Melika and Todd arrived at Thibodeaux, and the violent horror only increased from there. Melika and Todd didn’t make it to the dorm until 1 AM. It was early Saturday morning, and hundreds of inebriated freshmen were being funneled back into the vertical sprawl of the housing complex. The chattering roar of eighteen year olds and the  _basso_  proclamations of alpha masculine dominance were raising Melika’s hackles. She hadn’t felt any tension or stress since Todd had sat down beside her at  _Jardin_. Now, the fear that Melika knew all too well was coming back. That inescapable knowledge that one of these men could explode at any second.

Like clockwork, some of the boys in the crowd showed their true colors. After waiting for fifteen minutes, Melika and Todd had almost reached the entrance to T3 when a fight broke out just behind the anxious lover and impenetrable predator.

“Watch where you’re walking, faggot!”

A 5’10”, 150 lb white freshman in an Ed Hardy shirt and snapback had pushed a much smaller black man who was wearing a Welders jersey and ripped jeans. The smaller black man had an undercut. The buzzed hair which had started growing back in was dyed a baby blue. He was returning from  _Jardin_  with his boyfriend. The burly, bearded 6’4″ ‘mo decked the instigator right on the jaw and the Ed Hardy Bro (EHB) dropped faster than his G.P.A.

A mini-riot broke out within minutes.

The white friends of the EHB jumped the gay couple with a vicious efficiency. Ripped Jeans was curled up in a ball as four guys kicked him in his back, stomach, and head. Burly Bear was being held by the two biggest of the frat bros as three others took turns hitting him in the stomach and his face. The queers were outnumbered and would have stayed that way, but some of the other black students in the crowd — including two freshmen linebackers for the Welders — saw a bunch of peckerwoods kicking the shit out of a little black kid. At first, the new group just tried to break up the fight, but the frat bros were itching for a brawl. The couple’s rescuers’ decision not to back down left all hell breaking loose as half the crowd chose sides in the fight. Those decisions rode predictable racial and political lines.

Campus security surged out of the Thibodeaux dorms and converged on the worst of the fighting. However, cops being what they are — Klansmen and fascists in cosplay — the pigs reserved their most violent tactics for the black students that had tried to break up the fight in the first place.

Melika turned towards Todd as the chaos raged around them.

“Do you need to help? Should I head back to my place? This is really bad, right?”

Todd put his arm around Melika’s shoulder and kissed her gently on the cheek.

“This happens every weekend. Besides, the school doesn’t pay me enough to fight drunk, screaming guidos from Jersey.”

Melika nodded quietly and was trying to stave off an anxiety attack when the Ed Hardy Bro began to stand back up after his temporary sojourn to La La Land. The queer couple had retreated to the shadows of Thibodeaux #5 but they were still nearby. The brawl was getting bigger and bigger. More campus police had arrived and a cop on a loudspeaker said they were going to fire tear gas if the fight wasn’t broken up in the next five minutes.

The twink had his shirt off and was using it to clean the blood off of his bear’s face. The EHB saw the two share a brief, bloody kiss and an equally tender embrace. The EHB’s face flushed with rage. Melika watched as he pulled a switchblade out of his back pocket.

“Motherfucker,” Melika muttered under her breath.

As the EHB started to disentangle himself from the raucous crowd and began to advance to the couple’s little hideaway, Melika stepped forward and grabbed the EHB’s wrist and twisted it until he dropped the knife. A nearby student who had been paralyzed with fear kicked the knife down a sewage drain. The EHB tried to turn and swing at Melika, but he was drunk and he swung wide. Melika dodged his punch with ease and put the man in a full Nelson. Melika had her arms wrapped against the back of the man’s head. He thrashed and kicked, but Melika’s grip was firm.

“Chill the fuck out, and I’ll let you go.” Melika’s voice had dropped an octave.

The EHB thrashed some more and tried to surprise Melika with a swift head-butt, but he signaled the maneuver with no grace. As he flung his head backwards, Melika released her hold and spun herself til she was in front of and facing the EHB. As he staggered, Melika nearly took his head off with a discus clothesline.

The EHB was back on the sidewalk, unconscious and bleeding with some intensity from the back of his head. Todd was staring at Melika with intense concentration. Melika became self-conscious and tried to avert Todd’s gaze.

“I used to wrestle back in high school. He’ll be fine… probably.” Melika’s voice was back to its normal pitch. She was not particularly concerned with this asshole’s well-being.

Todd walked up to Melika and ran his fingers through her hair and beamed.

“I like a girl that knows how to take care of herself. Boy, my friends are going to love you.”

Melika started to blush again, but the line to get back in to Thibodeaux had thinned out as the brawl persisted. Todd grabbed Melika’s hand as the campus police began to advance in force on the dorms and led her inside of the tower.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of Gender Dysphoria, Severe Anxiety and Depression, Drug Use, Sexual Assault, Gaslighting, and Psychological Abuse

A couple of Todd’s coworkers were manning the late shift in Thibodeaux #3’s cramped lobby, checking student IDs and processing off-campus guest sign-ins. A tiny freshman girl was vomiting in a trashcan, near the line for the elevators. A friend held her hair back. The RAs working the desk all wore the same gold uniform and had the same “I’d rather be asleep or studying or out drinking or literally anywhere besides babysitting all these drunk assholes” look plastered on their faces.

The red-headed sophomore with the  _Introduction to Juvenile Delinquency_ and  _Juvenile Policing_ textbooks open in front of her was in charge of the ID swiping station. She did not smile when Todd approached.

“Enjoying your night off? Must be nice.”

She took Todd’s student ID and swiped it.

“It’s been wonderful.”

Todd flashed his most charming smile, but his peer still didn’t react. Todd’s face flushed with frustration. He hid the anger quickly, but Todd wasn’t fast enough to keep Melika from noticing his facade starting to crack. It was the first time she saw anything other than exactly what Todd wanted. It would not be the last.

Todd squeezed Melika’s shoulders. It hurt just a little bit, but Melika didn’t think Todd had meant to squeeze her so hard.

“This is Melika. She’s my guest. Say hi to Layla.”

Melika managed an indistinct squeak and a quick wave. Lalya managed a brief grunt in response.

“You’re going to have to get somebody else to sign her in as their guest. I’m already covering for Steve.”

Todd didn’t look at Layla as he responded and took Melika by the hand to the guest check-in station.

“That’s okay, Lay… that won’t be an issue.”

There wasn’t anyone else checking in a dorm tryst and so Melika and Todd were able to go straight to the front of the non-existent line. The station was held by a heavily bearded senior who beamed when he saw Todd.

“T!”

The “American Civil War cosplay” looking RA saw Melika and did a double take. She was used to the reaction, but Melika was too tired and on edge from the fight and the Orchid to say or do anything about this dude’s rudeness. Besides, her initial reaction was almost always to de-escalate a conflict. Melika hadn’t hit someone since elementary school, and adrenaline and testosterone were coursing through her system. She wanted to get to Todd’s room. Melika wanted privacy. She wanted to be alone with the one person she’d seen that evening that knew who she was even when her body sent different signals to the less informed and less inclusive around her.

“You make a friend tonight, Todd?”

“A very good one,” and Todd ruffled Melika’s hair. Melika had ceased to feel the affection in Todd’s touch. Melika couldn’t decide if she had started to have a bad trip or if the Orchid was actually just wearing off and that this was just her body reminding her that she’d never be happy. That she’d never be comfortable or satisfied.

_This is it. You are destined to meet earnest, charming suitors and your dysphoria will ruin everything._

“I need you to print your name and sign. Also, I need to make a copy of either a state-issued or university student ID.”

Melika was already shuffling through her purse when she said, “Melika Ghazi,” without remembering what name and photograph her driver’s license actually contained. Melika quietly gave her dead name and then handed her Hodges ID to the RA. She signed into Thibodeaux #3 under the name of a person who had only ever been the palest shadow of her true self.

Melika had only chosen her new name the summer between her sophomore and freshman year. It was an Urdu variant of the Arabic word for “Queen” although Malika hadn’t realized that last part until a couple years later. She’d named herself after an aunt that had watched her and loved her when she was a child. Her aunt was dead now. Melika wasn’t, and she needed something new to call herself.

Melika’s head still snapped if she was around other  _Desi_  kids in Oakland and she heard her dead name. It was a common enough boys name for Pakistani kids. However, Melika was Melika, and after the RA handed her ID back, her desire for an evening of lustful misadventures had vanished. Melika wanted to go home and had no idea how to broach the topic with Todd. She didn’t want to let him down.

The bearded RA smiled and his practiced ease contrasted his clear discomfort and confusion. “Okay, well, y’all have fun.”

Todd started to escort Melika to the line for the elevators when the card-swiping RA’s comments came back to her.

“Wait, Todd, I thought that girl said you needed somebody to sign me in as their guest. My dorm at Hodges has the same rule.”

Todd hadn’t expected the question, and Melika watched as he tried to come up with a suitable answer on the spot. Todd hadn’t been stumped or at a loss for words the whole evening, but here he was and Melika was catching his brow twisting as he tried to think of the most polite way to address that he didn’t have to sign her in because she wasn’t a woman as far as the dorm was concerned.

“Oh, right, yeah. Colin is a friend. RAs have a bad habit of letting each other slide when it comes to lots of rules. Guests included. We know that we’ll be responsible. Eighteen year olds on the other hand…”

Todd gesticulated to the cramped crowd around the elevators. Melika couldn’t keep track of all of the teenagers… that she was barely older than. She blushed when she saw a couple — two butch-leaning lesbians — that had their hands down each other’s pants. The shortest of the girls was having a not inaudible orgasm and nobody seemed to care.

Todd grabbed Melika’s hand and squeezed it firmly. “We’ll be upstairs before long.” Todd brushed Melika’s hair away from the side of her face and whispered in her ear. “We can redose then if you want. The Orchid might start wearing off soon.”

Melika and Todd had to wait another ten minutes before they were able to finally get on the elevator. The carriage was elbow-to-elbow when Melika, Todd, and more than a dozen other students boarded. They were among the last people to enter the elevator, and Melika wound up squished in a corner, pressed between Todd, one of the Welder’s linebackers that had broken up the initial fight outside the dorms, and the mirrored glass walls of the elevator.

Melika wasn’t a fan of elevators when she was in them by herself. They were steel death traps, dependent on too many other people not fucking up basic physics and engineering. Melika was a stairs kind of gal if she could help it. Being trapped in this monstrosity with mostly out-of-state PittU students who would gladly projectile vomit all over her if the elevator stopped or started too fast was an indignity she was increasingly not in the mood to bear.

Melika’s situation was not helped by her increasing suspicion that the Orchid in her system was finding its second wind. Melika had done enough uppers to know that the speed portion of her trip was over. The euphoria — both mental and tactile — that had overwhelmed Melika at the club was all gone. Melika no longer felt like she was without limits. She was tired. Her legs ached. Melika’s arms were sore from the tension of keeping the Ed Hardy Bro in that full nelson. Melika was lightheaded and she just wanted some water and to go to sleep more than anything else. However, the tension in Melika’s spine hadn’t gone away. That sense that if she just closed her eyes, then she could see into the hearts and souls of everyone around her hadn’t gone away. It was only getting stronger.

The elevator opened on the fourteenth floor. The carriage had thinned out a little, but the elevator was still overcrowded. The Welders linebacker near Melika tried to gently disengage himself from the group and get out of the elevator but more drunk freshmen girls attempted to board the “up” elevator that they refused to understand wasn’t going downstairs.

The linebacker had little trouble repelling the initial wave. He weighed nearly 300 pounds and even half a dozen freshies was nothing compared to the Miner’s front line in Morgantown. Those were scary college students. The LB had been hit in the face by batteries the student section was throwing when the Welders had gone down to West Virginia to play during the fall semester. What did a couple drunks, weighing maybe a hundred pounds a piece, mean to him?

However, two of the girls were able to sneak under the LB’s outstretched arms as he worked to repel this drunken horde. The pair that made it past him were the shortest and most sly of the revelers trying to force themselves into the elevator. They managed to slip past the LB, but the elevator’s other occupants attempted to shove them back out. The only thing they managed to accomplish was shoving these interlocutors into the LB’s back who stumbled as the freshmen girls bounced off of him and into Todd, knocking Melika over.

Melika was failing to keep her anxiety at bay when the prophecy came to her. The elevator was erupting with movement and anger. The drunk belligerents were being expelled, and the linebacker had stormed away from the scene. Everyone in the elevator was on edge. Melika could see the sheer tension sparking off of her neighbors. Bluish-white tendrils reaching, trying to grab anything in their reach, but as the elevator doors closed, everything and everyone inside of the elevator but her and Todd blinked out of existence.

Melika couldn’t breathe. Her heart wasn’t beating.

_Why did you ever let this stranger give you a drug you’ve never heard of? Why would you go home with him? Do you know anything about him? You don’t know anything about anyone. You never will_ _. You’re too naïve._

Todd was frozen in time as well. His arms were wrapped around Melika’s chest. His grip hurt. Melika began to fixate on how much Todd’s touch had hurt since they’d left  _Jardin_. How domineering and rough he was when she stopped and thought about him for even a second. Melika felt like bugs were crawling over her skin, reshaping her into their image. Melika wanted to thrash and kick, but she was paralyzed, like a child waking up from a nightmare that refused to end.

Melika had no choice but to stare at herself and Todd in the mirrored glass walls of the elevator. Melika felt disconnected from the woman she saw reflected back at her. She saw the fear and the barely restrained anger and the glazed over eyes of someone in the throes of a drug trip that had gotten the better of them. Melika hadn’t felt this afraid in so long. She had initially started to embrace her life as a woman because she was so tired of carrying all of that fear and anger inside of herself. Melika knew that there would always be places where she would feel rational fear. Places where she’d never feel comfortable because of her gender and/or her race and/or her religion. At least, though, she was able to stop being afraid of herself. Melika had let go of her self-loathing, but in that elevator, every ounce of every self-excoriating and self-destructive impulse she’d ever had was etched into the lines of her face.

And then there was Todd. Melika realized she couldn’t read anything in that face that Todd wasn’t actively, intentionally projecting. She was starting to wonder if he had said or done anything genuine the whole evening. Todd’s frozen face screamed alertness and attention. His head was turned, studying the deserted space of the depopulated elevator. His eyes seemed to be straining against the cessation of time and movement. Veins in Todd’s forehead bulged out of his head. Melika hadn’t noticed how muscular he was before. Todd’s firm forearms were squeezing her chest, and Melika could feel the outline of Todd’s abs against her back as he held her against his chest.

Melika didn’t think this nightmare could get worse until the glass walls of the elevator stopped reflecting its new, sparse population. Suddenly, Melika saw a dorm room and a bed. The room was a mess. There were clothes sprawled everywhere. The casually discarded clothes were the closest thing that the sparsely furnished room had to any decorations. There weren’t any posters or banners or pennants. No pictures of loved ones, friends, or family. Just textbooks and clothes, a laptop and food. Melika still couldn’t move her body, but all of the walls of the elevator had become glass portals to this room.

Todd and Melika were standing in the elevator, but they were also sitting on the dorm room’s bed. Melika had to watch as every awful fear came true through this looking glass.

Todd and Melika were listening to music. Melika didn’t recognize the melody although she and Robin and Virgil would all come to know it far too well.

“I like this. Who is this? I don’t recognize the language they’re singing in.”

Todd passed Melika a bottle of water that he had stored under his bed.

“Drink this. Orchid dehydrates you… especially since we redosed.”

Melika was sweating. Her eyes weren’t just glazed over. They were watery glass.

“Thanks… I don’t feel so good.”

“You just need to push past that for another ten minutes or so. It will go away soon.”

“Who did you say this band was?”

“Here. Let me help you relax.”

Todd slid behind Melika on the bed and started to give her a shoulder rub. Melika didn’t look more relaxed. She looked like she wanted to throw up.

“I’m okay… really. I kind of want to just lie down.”

The music was becoming part of Melika. She could feel its spiraling structure seeping into her.

_You did too much. You always do too much. You can’t ride the high. You can’t take care of yourself. You’ll never be okay._

“Yes! Lie down. That will help.”

Melika watched in frozen horror as she lied down on Todd’s bed. Melika was making guttural moans. The words she could speak were slurred. Melika was drenched in sweat. The perspiration was rolling down her face in little rivulets.

After Melika lied down, Todd laid on his side next to her. He started to kiss Melika’s neck and her face and her shoulders. Melika’s dress zipped up in the back, and Todd started to undo the zipper. He slid Melika’s dress down her chest. Melika was wearing a bralette. She didn’t have large, noticeable breasts. That came with the territory of not being able to afford hormones or top surgery. Melika liked how the bralette made her feel. She liked the security it implied.

“I don’t… I’m not… No…”

Melika stuttered and slurred the words as Todd slid the bralette over her head. Todd was either actively ignoring Melika’s protestations or was too distracted to care to listen. In the elevator, Melika’s muscles strained against their invisible restraints. She wanted to break free of Todd’s statuesque grasp. She wanted to reclaim control of her arms and her legs. Melika wanted to smash the glass walls showing her this nightmare. She wanted her fists to be drenched in blood and glass if that was what it took.

Melika had no choice but to watch instead.

After Todd removed Melika’s bralette, he started to give her a full back massage. Melika moaned in intoxicated pleasure but also moaned incoherent syllables of resistance and discomfort. Todd reached around and grabbed Melika’s chest. He squeezed her small breasts and softly pinched and tweaked her hard nipples. Melika watched as she started to get an erection underneath the light cloth of her dress.

Todd’s hands traveled further down Melika’s chest until he reached her waist where Melika’s dress was hanging loosely at her sides. Todd brushed against Melika’s sex with his hand, over her dress.

“I’m… I’m sorry… I promissh I’m… urgh… a girl.”

Todd smiled his wolfish grin.

“I know you are. Didn’t I say you needed to relax?”

Todd picked Melika’s water bottle off the floor. Melika was groaning and limply trying to push Todd’s hand away from her penis. Melika couldn’t see as Todd dropped another petal of Orchid into her bottle. She was too high to notice that the bottle began to hum a bright orange before returning to normal.

Melika drank the water, but she spat it out almost immediately.

“Thisssh… tashtes baddd.”

Todd put the bottle back to Melika’s mouth and held it there til she drank.

“You’re just dehydrated. That happens…”

Melika tried to sit up but collapsed. Todd uttered more commands of relaxation. Melika struggled to keep her eyes open. Her protestations were becoming weaker and more inaudible. Todd’s hands touched all of the parts of Melika he was never given consent to explore. He removed the remaining clothes Melika wore. He kissed and fondled Melika as she passed out and Melika had to watch everything that came after from the elevator.

Melika was stuck in this hell for what she assumed was eternity. She was certain this was the only life and existence she would ever know again. Then, time unfroze and everyone in the elevator around her returned.

Melika had the anxiety attack she had been failing to stave off the entire evening. One moment, she was watching herself be assaulted, and the next, she was in a crowded elevator, held by the man she had just seen violate her. Melika was hyper-ventilating and everyone on the elevator could tell. Todd tried to assuage the crowd. He told the spectators that she was prone to fits like this. These things happened. Todd held her close to his chest and Melika was breathing so rapidly that she was struggling to not pass out.

By the time, they got off the elevator, Melika’s breathing was returning to normal, and she  _was not_  going to go back to Todd’s room.

“I have to go home.”

Todd ran his hands through Melika’s hair and smiled at her. His smile was like a black hole and Melika was being sucked back into it.

“You saw something right? It’s just the Orchid. When you’re coming down, if you don’t redose, it can get weird.”

Todd grabbed Melika by the hand and dragged her into a supply closet that was near the elevators. He turned on the lights. The smell of  bleach made Melika ill. Todd reached into his pocket and pulled back out the bag of Orchid. There were still plenty of petals left. Todd had spent the evening with Melika instead of dealing.

“Here. Just take another one. You’ll be fine.”

Melika opened her mouth to say no but she was so tired and exhausted that no words came out. Todd smiled and placed the Orchid on her tongue.

“Sure, I’ll feed this one to you. Is that your thing? I like it when a girl knows her kinks.”

Melika was too tired and scared and beat down to do anything but swallow the Orchid. She followed Todd back to his room. Everything in her vision came true.


	7. How It Will Always Be

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of Gender Dysphoria. Discussions of self-harm, drug use, and anxiety.

Melika was on Tumblr.

She hadn’t been dragged out to  _Terre_. Melika was happy to be at the gallery. She was celebrating Sabine’s big night. Melika wanted to be present for Sabine, and she was… sort of.

Melika had been fine when Sabine was with her. A close friend was the only emotional support system Melika still needed to function in crowded, public spaces. She’d come so far since college. Her days of intense, total seclusion were mostly behind her.

Melika had been fine when Severin had stopped by and asked how she was doing. They always took a special interest in Melika when she came in to  _Terre_ with Sabine. Severin did have a habit of studying Melika intently and not apologizing for the stares. She could handle Severin’s looks though. Melika knew why they stared. Unlike most folks in the ‘Burgh, Severin couldn’t have cared less about Melika’s visible Adam’s apple. Her visions were of far more interest.

Yet, Melika still felt like she would rather cease to now be or have ever been than be left by herself at shows like this.

_This is how it will always be_ _._

Melika had been with Sabine when they saw the teen girls kissing in front of Sabine’s painting. Melika was so envious of the Iranian sixteen year old. When Melika was sixteen, she hadn’t accepted that she was queer… let alone that she wasn’t a man. Were this girl’s parents Muslims too? Did they know their daughter was queer? Melika guessed that the girl’s family was  _Shia_. Melika still considered herself  _Sunni_ , but she hadn’t been to a mosque since she was eighteen. There were very few where she felt welcome, and there weren’t any trans-inclusive mosques in Pittsburgh. Melika had found other queer and trans Muslims to worship with in the city when she felt the need. Those moments were coming more and more often lately.

After the teen girls walked away, Melika was struck by how long it had been since she’d kissed someone.

_Has it really been four years?_

Melika didn’t date much although she and Sabine had maintained a platonic intimacy and their current living arrangements for eight years. Melika’s relationship with Sabine was the longest of her life. She was fine with sex being off of that particular table.

Even before Melika transitioned and accepted the truth of her feminine nature, she had been too femme to date the straight women she was so certain she was meant to pursue. The relationships just never worked. Women knew Melika wasn’t a man, even when she didn’t. Melika was 6’4″. She took almost fetishistic care of her long, thick hair. Anyone that saw her smile felt that beam in the pit of their stomach. Melika had looked just enough like a man and carried enough of her masculine socialization to occasionally meet heteroflexible women that didn’t know it yet. Melika’s brief flings would end when the other woman knew there was something fundamentally different about Melika from everything that woman had been taught to want from a man. The women would break up with Melika, and Melika could never figure out why until she accepted she was a woman and began her transition.

Melika had developed coping mechanisms to help her deal with the loneliness. Dr. Zhi had ensured that Melika could take care of herself. Thank god for therapy… and SSRIs. Melika knew that her self-worth and her womanhood weren’t dependent on the judgments of cishet stares. She knew that what happened in the Thibodeaux dorms a decade ago happened because abusers prey on women. Melika knew that abusers found folks like her who wanted to trust other people… to be close to and vulnerable with another person because society and family that were supposed to love them isolated them instead. Melika knew that Todd’s assault hadn’t been her fault. She understood this, and Melika had been done letting the memories of that evening define her life and her possibilities for years… although Melika was a lot more careful about what drugs she did with which strangers these days.

Melika’s recovery had been difficult. She had barely survived the months that followed Thibodeaux. If she hadn’t started seeing Dr. Zhi and if Sabine hadn’t come barreling into her life, Melika was certain she would not have made it to her late 20s. She wasn’t ashamed to admit how essential both her therapist and her best friend had been to her recovery. Everyone needed someone, and, by necessity, Melika had spent so much of her life cutting out all of the folks that had hurt her. She knew she needed to start putting in the work to foster the healthy relationships in her life.

Dr. Zhi helped Melika recognize and avoid her self-destructive behavior patterns. She helped Melika chart a path to healing and a better future. She encouraged Melika to join Omikron Epsilon Delta. Melika had been seeing Dr. Zhi for as long as she’d been seeing Sabine. Sabine reminded Melika of what familial, unconditional love looked like. Sabine helped Melika remember the intensity of a friendship that lights your entire world on fire. Both Melika and Sabine considered themselves to be poly and pan, but there was never a sexual element to their relationship. There was an intense intellectual and interpersonal attraction. Sabine had been the first to say “I love you,” and Melika reciprocated the phrase without having to think in response. Six months after they moved in together, Sabine held Melika in their arms as they fell asleep on the couch watching re-runs of  _True_   _Blood_. Sabine told Melika they couldn’t wait to grow old with her, but they never kissed. They never had sex.

Melika and Sabine had discussed taking their relationship to a different level. Neither was ace. Melika had sex with a handful of partners after the Thibodeaux incident and her recovery began. Sabine had a revolving cast of poly sex/romantic partners. Melika and Sabine conceded that they felt a sexual attraction to each other. However, they both needed the stability a purely platonic relationship would provide. Of course, they soon realized that sex-less relationships could be just as messy as sexual relationships, but Melika and Sabine had weathered every storm they’d faced. Melika joked that they weren’t having any less sex than her parents and they were sure as shit fighting less. Sabine was still trying to come up with a gender-neutral term for them being Melika’s common-law non-binary spouse.

Melika’s last sexual relationship had ended when her lesbian partner had tried to make Melika choose between her and Sabine. Melika’s choice was never in doubt, and Melika hadn’t gone out of her way to date since. She was happy enough with Sabine.

Still, Melika’s dysphoria in public was intense. Melika would see young people in groups — either as couples or as friends — and her mind would fall down a rabbit hole of her own trauma and her past isolation and all Melika could think about was all of the nights she spent at home and later in dorm rooms where she couldn’t make herself go out or be around anyone. Of the evenings where she’d look in the mirror and see a man’s face staring back at her. A face that told Melika that her external identity would never match the softness and warmth she knew that she contained inside of herself. Of all of the stares from everyone over the years who couldn’t figure out if she was a man or a woman. Who wanted to make sure that she felt othered in every space she occupied. Melika would find herself unable to breathe to this day if she hadn’t taken her medicine in a while and she was left by herself. Melika loved Melika, but being alone was a reminder of the fate she knew could always be just around the corner.

Melika used her phone and social media as a way to distract herself when the anxiety was too much to bear. It centered her. Melika felt a little weird about being almost 30 and still being as attached to her Tumblr as she was, but, until Melika had as many queer/trans friends in Pittsburgh as she did on the internet, she wasn’t going to make any apologies for needing a safe place.

 _Terre_  was better for Melika’s lingering dysphoria than her stock-girl work at Arlo’s Electronics. Most folks at  _Terre_  knew what the word “cis” meant. Melika worked in the back at Arlo’s. She rarely interacted with customers. Sometimes, though, there would be staff shortages. Melika would have to work on the sales floor, and she knew why the majority of the customers asked other people for help. Melika could get all of the therapy she wanted. She could spend as much time in Sabine’s embrace as she liked. She could receive all of the affirmation in the world from people that mattered to her, but spending every day knowing that your existence is an affront to so many others… that it triggers existential confusion and anger in so many… it takes its toll. Melika was done feeling guilty about choosing to disappear to places where she didn’t feel afraid or unwelcome when her mental health was at its most vulnerable.

Melika was scrolling through Tumblr, using tags of fan art for her favorite  _shoujo_  magical girl manga, when she saw Sabine’s painting,  _Home_.

Melika was confused. She knew Sabine didn’t have a Tumblr even though she had tried to convince them to set one up for their art ages ago. Sabine tried to use as little social media as possible. They tended to get calls from their mother when they actually spoke their mind on Facebook and Twitter. Sabine did not like getting calls from their mother. Melika was fairly certain Sabine hadn’t uploaded  _Home_.

Melika figured someone else in the gallery had uploaded a photo of the painting. She was impressed by the editing job someone had done, presumably on their cellphone. The photo didn’t include the painting’s oak frame. Melika couldn’t figure out why  _Home_  was showing up in the tags for  _Koko and Friends_  though. There wasn’t a clear original poster either. Melika figured her phone’s app was acting up. Her phone was five years old now and Melika hoped she could keep it for another five. She didn’t need anything more fancy than what she already had, but Melika had to admit the phone was breaking down as often as it worked anymore.

Melika tried to scroll past the photo. She decided the painting was in her timeline because of geo-data her phone was transmitting. Melika thought Tumblr was just trying to show her something it thought she’d be interested in. However, when Melika attempted to scroll past the photo, the next image on her dashboard was  _Home_  again. This time, the barest edge of the oak frame was visible.

Melika started to sweat. This was not a computer error. She knew that she was about to have a prophecy. Ever since her vision in the elevator, Melika had been plagued by foretellings.

Melika didn’t have warm, fuzzy visions. She had come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t going to wake up one day with the lottery numbers… or if she did, that surely meant the world was coming to an end. Melika’s visions showed more catastrophic futures.

Just a month before the Art Crawl, Melika walked to the window of her bedroom in the second story apartment that she shared in Lawrenceville with Sabine. She needed to go out and buy some groceries, and Melika wanted to know what the weather was like. It was a cloudless day. Melika looked down at the streets, and, suddenly, she saw herself walking out of her building and onto the sidewalk. Melika made it a block before a torrential storm arrived. Rain was falling like a special effect in an apocalyptic storm movie. Melika watched from her window as her doppelganger was struck by lightning in the streets, the electricity arcing from her fried corpse to the cars and buildings around her. Melika never went to the bodega that day, and, sure enough, a freak thunderstorm whipped through Alleghany County, and lightning struck the exact spot Melika had seen in her vision. There were still black scorch marks on the sidewalk.

A couple years back, Melika and Sabine had made plans to go camping with some of Sabine’s friends at Cooper’s Rock in West Virginia. Melika had been excited for months. She’d gone with Sabine to all of the stores as they’d purchased their tent and supplies for the getaway. In the days leading up to the trip, Melika had made all of the snacks she and Sabine would have needed to survive a weekend in the woods. Sabine had helped Melika make some THC-infused brownies. Melika hadn’t been this excited for an outing since she was a little kid. Then, Melika had a nightmare about her tent being ripped open as she had to watch as Sabine was mauled by a bear. The bear began to advance on Melika before she woke up. Sabine listened to Melika’s visions. They didn’t go on the trip. A bear chased their friends out of their campsite before the trip was over.

Two weeks after the elevator incident, Melika had the vision that got her into therapy. Melika was walking through the Hodges campus in Oakland. She wasn’t paying any attention to the world around her. Melika couldn’t believe she was making herself still go to class. Failing out of college came much later. Melika couldn’t look any of her teachers or classmates in the eye. She couldn’t talk in class. However, she had to force herself to not stay at home, in her dorm, because she knew that she’d kill herself if she didn’t leave. Melika was walking past the Rhodes Tower and trying to keep from having a nervous breakdown on campus when she heard screaming from far above her head.

Rhodes Tower was the tallest building on the Hodges campus. It was one of the tallest buildings in Pittsburgh period, and the only buildings that towered over it were downtown skyscrapers like the McDonald Financial Building. The construction of Rhodes Tower had been ordered by Nelson Hodges himself, the steel magnate/education enthusiast that had founded Hodges University and whose name was stamped across half the city in one form or another. Nelson Hodges had a fixation on Greek mythology, and Rhodes Towers was to be his colossi. His towering phallus in the heart of the school district. However, like most of Hodges’ more aesthetically minded students, Melika had to admit that the building’s aggressive, classical design was a welcome, stark contrast to the endless banks, offices, and hospital towers that dominated the city’s skyline.

Melika heard the screams as she walked across the sprawling green that housed Rhodes Tower. She looked up and she saw a body hurtling towards the earth. Melika screamed and leapt out of the body’s way which came crashing to the sidewalk in an explosive red mist. Melika could feel warm blood dripping down her face and arms and legs. Melika knew who the body was before she knelt down to turn it over. Melika recognized her own floral print maxi skirt and orange sweater. Melika looked around and although folks had turned towards her scream, no one seemed to notice or care about the misshapen corpse or the corpse’s blood-spattered doppelganger. Melika knew no one had seen or heard anything but her. Melika turned the body over and saw her own dead eyes staring back at her. Melika knew she wasn’t ready to die and she made an appointment with Mental Health Services through Hodges as soon as she got home. She met Sabine a month later.

Melika had a seeing at least once a week. They weren’t always about her. She had plenty of visions about Sabine which Sabine always took seriously. Melika’s brothers and sisters in OED also tended to treat her second sight with respect. The Caretakers knew how rare it was to have a genuine prophet in their mix. Melika had talked to Chad a couple month’s before Sabine’s gallery show. She had a nightmare that he’d totaled his Prius in a multi-car pileup on his normal route from his apartment in Oakland to the Hodges campus where he was now teaching. Chad took a slightly longer route to work and avoided a twelve-vehicle accident that dominated the local news for two weeks.

Melika had gotten much better at staying calm when she saw her nightmares brought to life. If she started to scream or make a scene every time she saw herself get decapitated or watched a building burn in a fire no one could see but her, Melika would have been institutionalized. She’d been down that path once. No thank you. Never again.

And, so, while in  _Terre_ , as her phone began to scroll so quickly that the images of  _Home_  looked like choppy, projected film reel, Melika did her best to stay calm. The view of Sabine’s painting gradually pulled away from the tight zoom that had initially been presented to Melika.  _Home_ was resting on a desk that Melika recognized. The desk was in Tracy Houston’s office at Hodges. Melika had gone to Tracy’s office with Sabine on a couple of different occasions. Tracy had been Sabine’s advisor when Sabine was in school, and they’d stayed on close terms since. Just as Melika began to mentally place whose desk  _Home_ was resting on, a knife entered the frame on her phone and slashed a huge gash in the painting.

The framing of  _Home_  continued to pull back until Melika could see the hand holding the knife. The hand was large. There was an engagement ring on the ring finger. The knife continued to hack away at the painting until it was torn to shreds. The framing pulled further back and Melika could see the arm holding the knife. The arm was covered by a rolled up, lilac men’s dress shirt. The framing kept pulling back until Melika could see the back of a man’s head with a thinning mane of auburn hair that fell just past his shoulders. The man stopped slashing  _Home_ and breathed heavily in anger and exhaustion. He turned around and left Tracy’s office.

It was Professor Arnoldson.


	8. Twenty Minutes Later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of Anxiety and Gender Dysphoria. Considerations of fascist and anti-immigrant violence.

Sabine had gone to the restroom after Tracy’s lecture. They didn’t go in there to cry. Sabine was almost 30. They could handle criticism although Sabine knew that Tracy and Severin were the lifelines by which their career as an artist was able to stay afloat. They couldn’t afford for Tracy and Severin to get bored with their work.

Sabine had gone to the bathroom because they just needed a couple minutes to themselves. They didn’t want Tracy to know that her words had cut so deep. Sabine had only painted  _Home_ in the first place because they  _had_ to get a piece placed in the Art Crawl. Sabine knew that Severin operated on far more patriotic nostalgia than they would ever let on.  _Home_  was guaranteed money, and Sabine had helped make a sale with Tracy’s help.

Sabine had resented the implication that they didn’t care about _Home_. The piece had ceased to be just a business ploy the moment they placed the first brushstrokes on their canvas.

Sabine hadn’t been back to the home their painting captured since they were in high school.  _Home_  wasn’t a surrealist commentary on the bewildering, incomprehensible beauty of nature. Sabine hadn’t painted a landscape as literal as this since their art school days.  _Home_  was Fae. Sabine knew that was why Severin had wiped away their tears when they’d seen the painting. Sabine knew it had been so much longer since Severin had seen their home, and Sabine knew that it was likely that Severin would never get to go home again. They were  _Divise_. They were exiles.  _Home_  was Sabine’s ode to the land of their  _zaza_  and the rest of the  _Divise_ stuck here on Earth.

Sabine’s mother was human. Paulina Almeida had been born in Pittsburgh. She went to school in Pittsburgh. She had been one of the most beloved prosecutors in the city for decades, and now she was the city’s top criminal prosecutor. Sabine’s other parent, though, was Fae. Their  _zaza_ , Jocelyn, had died when Sabine was very young. Their mother didn’t talk about Jocelyn much, and Sabine’s only strong memory of their  _zaza_  had been of a day trip to the Kohler Conservatory when Sabine was barely four.

Sabine remembered going to the Orchid Room. Jocelyn had picked up Sabine in their strong, muscular arms and held them close to the flowers. Sabine kept a yellow orchid in their apartment with Melika. Every time the flower bloomed, Sabine would stop to catch its fragrance, and they would get chills and feel their  _zaza_ ‘s arms wrapped around them.

Sabine’s defenses of  _Home_  to the contrary, they knew their art wasn’t where they wanted it to be and hadn’t been for a long time. Sabine couldn’t focus. Every day was a bombardment and their mental health was the fire radius. Fascism and white nationalism was ascendant across America. Sabine was smart enough to know that neither had ever gone away, but they’d also been alive long enough to know that adherents of those ideologies hadn’t been this brazen in public in decades.

Sabine was a citizen. Their mother was a second-generation Puerto Rican immigrant. Paulina had tried her hardest to root Sabine in American values and an American education. It never took. Sabine was too proud of their Puerto Rican heritage. They were too fascinated by their Fae lineage that their mother refused to discuss. Sabine wanted nothing to do with American imperialism and capitalism, but they lived and worked in an America that reminded them every day that people that looked like them weren’t welcome. They lived and worked in a toxic nation that had shown its true colors to Hispanic immigrants trying to flee the crushing poverty that colonizers like the US had inflicted on them. Sabine felt guilty every day that they could go home to their comfortable bed and work on their art when so many folks like them were being turned away from this nation in droves.

Sabine was heavily involved with socialist organizations in the city including the bigger Marxist-Leninist groups. But Sabine didn’t think they’d ever feel like they were doing enough unless the Rev finally came and they knew that was never happening in their lifetime.

All of this was taking a toll on their work.

Sabine got themselves back together emotionally in  _Terre_ ‘s restroom. All of the restrooms at  _Terre_  were gender-neutral.  _Jardin_  as well. The Fae didn’t have a concept of gender or, at least, not one that matched easily with cisheteronormative understandings of the term. Being a single-sex species tended to confuse more binary-oriented humans.

Severin put in more labor than Arsene to pass. Putting on a masculine glamour made Severin’s job easier. Arsene put in labor to smash cisheteronormative understandings of gender to dust. Sabine preferred Arsene’s company, but they hadn’t partied at  _Jardin_  in months and it had been months before that.

Paulina had raised Sabine with as much of an agender perspective as she could muster per Jocelyn’s insistent request. However, when you’re nb and you’re AFAB but your name is Sabine and you’re pocket-sized, toxic masculine perspectives have a habit of infantilizing and dominating you whether your mother or deceased Fae  _zaza_  likes it or not.

Sabine had identified as a woman for a while. It was a conscious decision when Sabine was a teenager, but as Sabine got to know the  _Divise_  in the city while they were in college and as they met other genderqueer and transgender human beings (with whom they shared half their DNA), Sabine realized all of the expectations and realities of “womanhood” fit them like an overlarge potato sack. Their existence was a testament to the anachronistic absurdity that cishet mediocrity was all we could hope for.

Sabine really wished they were stoned. They did not need to be having deep, semi-panicked thoughts in the pisser of the art gallery. This was not college. They had their shit together. Sabine had heard so many of the focused breathing mantras Dr. Zhi had taught Melika over the years. They were reciting them to themselves and attempting to stay calm.

Sabine felt the tension wash off their shoulders. The  _Divise_  had helped Sabine out in so many ways, but Sabine also knew they’d probably be dead if it weren’t for transaffirmative psychiatry and the daily coping mechanisms the field had gifted them. Sabine wasn’t looking to party at any point that evening, but they could consider the possibility of leaving their bathroom stall.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Sabine left the bathroom.

Sabine scanned  _Terre_  for Melika. Sabine was grateful that their girlfriend was so tall. Sabine’s view of the world was almost crotch-level. Melika was their towering lady of arms. Sabine just wished Melika could see herself that way some days.

Sabine felt bad about leaving Melika by herself. They knew that she was still not great with crowds, but Melika had insisted on coming even as Sabine had told them it would mostly just be an evening of politicking and schmoozing. Sabine loved Melika. They were so in love with Melika. They wished Melika knew she didn’t need her to push herself so hard. They knew how much she loved them.

Sabine finally spotted Melika near Colin’s columns. Melika was standing motionless, staring at her phone. Sabine’s breathing slowed. They had studied Melika from afar at enough parties, just checking on her to make sure she was doing alright. Melika was always on her phone, but she was also always walking. Sabine knew that Melika kept moving because it gave the impression that she was engaged with the world around her enough to be mobile and still be on her phone. Melika’s face was frozen except for her bulging eyes.

 _Please not tonight,_   _Melika. What have you seen_   _now_ _?_

Sabine zipped across the gallery floor, ignoring an invitation from Severin to meet the youngest Cochran daughter. They stopped in front of Melika who immediately looked up at them.

“I… I… I… we… we…”

“Let’s go. Right now.”

Sabine attempted to lead a hyper-ventilating Melika by the hand towards  _Terre_ ‘s exit. In Sabine’s haste, however, they misjudged their turn back towards the gallery’s doors. Sabine’s shoulders swung into Colin’s hollow  _papier-mache_  instillation and the five faux-marble columns came crashing down, spraying plaster and paper into the gallery.

Melika had stopped breathing. Sabine thought she might pass out if she didn’t start breathing soon. Severin was radiating astonishment and frustration from across the gallery floor. Sabine thought Tracy was doing her best not to laugh. Melika was starting to turn a little purple.

“Oops. Sorry about that.”

Sabine gave a little half-hearted wave and grabbed Melika by the hand, and the pair ran out of the gallery.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions and discussions of gender dysphoria, suicidal ideation, depression, teacher-student sexual relationships, and suicide.

Melika hadn’t used Dr. Zhi’s couch since her first session.

It was a comfortable couch. Melika had no complaints about the couch’s aesthetics. It was a textured, floral cotton print. Cream. Dr. Zhi said it had been her mother’s. Melika would have loved to have had a couch just like that in her apartment with Sabine, but that couch had carried the psychic weight of the spiritual trauma of so many for so long. Melika was a lightning rod for all of that psychic energy.

Melika and Dr. Zhi had settled on an alternative to the couch. Dr. Zhi bought an inflatable mattress and pillows. Melika supplied sheets and a throw blanket for when it was cold. Melika stared up at Dr. Zhi’s plaster ceiling as her head rested on three firm pillows. Dr. Zhi didn’t usually administer her treatment with such a Freudian visual framing, but Melika wasn’t one for eye contact to begin with so they made their system work.

“How are things with Sabine?”

“Great. I mean, yeah, great. They’ve got this new partner. So, they’re out a little more than they had been lately, but they’re happy, and when we’re together, we’re happy.”

“Have you started seeing anyone else?”

Melika just shook her head.

“Words, Melika.”

“I… no.”

“Didn’t you just tell me last week you were thinking about re-installing OKCupid on your phone?”

Melika picked her phone up off the mattress and shoved it back in the pocket from which it had just fallen.

“I’m happy enough with Sabine.”

“Yes, you two are very good for each other, but Sabine has several rich lives outside of you. You need at least one outside of them. When was the last time you went out and did something just by yourself?”

Melika didn’t answer.

“Melika… we’ve talked about this. You’re doing so much better than you were nine years ago. Your medicine is helping. I hope our sessions help, but I know just looking at you how much better you are. I can tell you’re sleeping. You’re confident. You aren’t apologizing to me every other sentence. I haven’t heard you mention hurting yourself in five years and I haven’t truly feared you’d do anything like that to yourself in at least three. You have something to offer to the world. You don’t have to be so afraid to share your light.”

Melika was trying not to cry. What she hadn’t told Dr. Zhi was that she had redownloaded OKCupid. Her highest match was Todd. She had immediately deleted the app and smoked an entire blunt to stave off a panic attack.

Dr. Zhi quickly realized how upset Melika had become.

“Oh, Melika. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just care about you. I haven’t had very many patients for as long as I’ve had you. I assumed a familiarity that was unprofessional, and I’m sorry.”

Melika couldn’t hold back the tears and started sobbing. Before Melika could stop herself, the truth of her brief foray into trying online dating again was spilling out uncontrollably. Melika didn’t breathe as she told Dr. Zhi what had happened.

“When was the last time you saw Todd?”

“The semester before I dropped out.”

“Where did you see him?”

“At the OED house.”

“I thought you told me once that he had been an RA at PittU?”

“He was. He was at the party with my Big.”

“Oh. Right. Yes. I remember this now. The deaf woman who was singing the same song that had been playing during your assault.”

Melika nodded and Dr. Zhi had enough tact to not remind her to verbalize.

“What was this woman’s name? We haven’t talked about her in years.”

“Robin. Robin Goldberg.”

“Did you never tell her what happened to you? Did she not know about your history with Todd?”

Melika shook her head as she choked back more tears.

“Why not?”

“OED was my safe place. You were the one that told me to pledge. You introduced me to Chad and Professor Arnoldson.”

Dr. Zhi shifted uncomfortably in her chair, but Melika was staring up at the ceiling and didn’t notice.

“I didn’t think Robin needed to know what happened to me. I mean… what am I supposed to do? Should I tell every woman I meet that I was raped? Should I tell them who raped me?”

“Is that what you think you need to do?”

“I can’t with that Socratic shit right now, Dr. Zhi. Don’t make me feel worse than I already do.”

“You know that isn’t what I’m trying to do, Melika, but I can’t tell you how to live your life. You have to decide. You have to act. Don’t you wish someone had told you about Todd before you met him?”

Melika sat up and looked at Dr. Zhi who didn’t turn away from her glare.

“Of course. You don’t have to ask questions like that.”

“Then why didn’t you ever say anything to this Robin woman? Clearly, she and Todd must run in at least overlapping circles. You met him at  _Jardin_. I know you occasionally forget this, Melika, but I was young once as well. I was in OED. I know how often I went to  _Jardin_ when I was your age. Why didn’t you ever mention Todd to Robin?”

Melika barely kept herself from screaming, “Because I still thought it was my fault.”

“Do you still think it was your fault?”

“No! You helped me realize that. Sabine helped me realize that.” Melika broke down again. “But what if whatever happened to Robin was my fault?”

“Did you drug and abduct Robin?”

“No.”

“Then nothing that happened to her was your fault.”

“Why would you ask me all of these questions if it wasn’t?”

“You are not the trauma that happens to you, Melika. You are not the trauma that happens to everyone that you know and love. I know that your PTSD doesn’t always make it seem like that’s the case, but you are all of the good and beauty you put into the world and not the evil that others push onto you.”

Dr. Zhi closed her eyes and concentrated until the tension went out of her face. Melika had started to notice the lines that were beginning to etch themselves into the side of Dr. Zhi’s face. It was so weird that this woman was in her 40s now. Had they been seeing each other for that long?

“However, Melika, there are consequences for our silence in this world. We have to accept that. The hurt others may suffer because we didn’t act doesn’t always rest at our feet, but we have to carry the knowledge of what our inaction wrought. I know that you understand this now, but you can’t hate yourself for not understanding it when you were just a kid.”

“Are you sure?” Melika choked out between sobs.

“Yes, Melika. You know that we share a very specific history in this regard. I struggle in my relationships with men and women every day. The gnawing doubt about what I could have done differently. The omnipresent anxiety at the periphery of my consciousness that this loved one will hurt me too. The impulse to recoil from an affectionate touch because that’s how he used to touch me. But at the end of the day, I’m not angry with me anymore. I just want you to get to that same place, Melika.”

Melika started to wipe tears from her eyes as her sobs turned to sniffles. “That was very manipulative, Dr. Zhi.”

“There is a fine line between psychiatry and sociopathy.”

Melika laughed between otherwise silent tears. As Melika placed her shirt against her face to wipe away the remaining tears, Lily, Dr. Zhi’s two year old chocolate lab puppy, came bounding into the cracked door of Dr. Zhi’s home office.

“Lily! You can’t be in here!”

Dr. Zhi started laughing and got up to grab Lily, but Lily bounded under Dr. Zhi’s clumsily outstretched arms. Lily tore off towards the couch and grabbed her favorite throw pillow. Lily had the pillow in her mouth and dropped it off on Melika’s lap and looked at her expectantly like she wanted her to play fetch.

Without thinking, Melika grinned and grabbed the pillow.

Melika was sitting on Dr. Zhi’s couch. Except Melika quickly realized  _she_  wasn’t sitting on Dr. Zhi’s couch. The hands that were in front of her were white. They were holding Dr. Zhi’s pillow and compulsively picking at the purple cross-stitches of the pillow’s deep purple sailboat.

“Candace, did you hear what I asked?”

Dr. Zhi was sitting in her leather chair across from Melika’s line of sight. She was wearing her most reserved white button up shirt and jeans. Candace shook her head.

“Sorry… I was just… thinking about stuff.”

“Were you thinking about him?”

Candace nodded her head.

“Have you spoken to him since our last session?”

Candace almost invisibly shook her head no.

“Have you tried to speak to him?”

Candace nodded her head.

“And he’s just ignored you?”

Candace nodded her head.

“You have to speak to me, Candace.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“Sorry. I mean… okay. Yeah.”

“Why did you reach out to him again? I thought he had made it fairly clear that he didn’t want to speak to you anymore.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“That motherfucking piece of shi…

I’m sorry, Candace. No, I’m not but I shouldn’t curse like that in front of a patient.”

Candace didn’t respond. Melika was overwhelmed by how empty Candace felt. There was life growing inside of her. But Melika didn’t feel the child. She didn’t feel Candace’s justified fear. She didn’t feel her equally justified anger. She just felt a hollow inevitability and a singular purpose of intent. Melika recognized the barrel of that gun.

“Does Arnoldson know?”

Candace still didn’t respond. Melika knew that Candace had sent Arnoldson half a dozen voice mails and twice as many texts. She had no idea if he’d actually listened to or seen any of her messages. She wasn’t sure if it was worse if he was just ignoring her completely or if he knew the truth and was avoiding her still. How do you quantify that degree of evil?

“You have options, Candace. I know your family background, and I know how much you value your faith, but I hope that you’re considering  _all_  of your options. You don’t have to have this child. You are so young.”

“I’m sorry; I have to go.”

Candace stood up and stormed out of Dr. Zhi’s office as Dr. Zhi yelled at her to not leave and then Melika was back on the mattress, holding the throw pillow, thinking about killing herself for the first time in six months. She knew exactly how she’d do it. There was a helium tank at the Arlo’s office for when they wanted to blow up balloons for big sales. Melika would steal it and suck down helium til she asphyxiated. At least she’d go out happy.

And then Melika slapped herself in the face in front of Dr. Zhi and turned to her psychiatrist.

“Did she kill herself?”

“Melika! Why did you hit yourself?!”

“Is she dead, Dr. Zhi? Candace, is she dead?!”

Dr. Zhi looked at the throw pillow Melika was holding and a look of horror consumed her face and Dr. Zhi was slow to compose herself.

“Yes. She hung herself.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody!”

“Tell anybody what?” Dr. Zhi’s furious stare was a challenge and not a deflection.

“He knocked her up and she killed herself and Arnoldson is still teaching at this school!”

“Do you really think I wouldn’t do something, Melika? One of my patients is dead. I went to Dean Becken myself. Ansel made me a personal promise to take care of the problem. I haven’t heard about Arnoldson sleeping with any Hodges students since… Candace killed herself, but, other than that, Arnoldson has faced no consequences from the school or the Caretakers.

I would do anything to ensure that man doesn’t get anywhere near another young student for the rest of his life, but when the only evidence I have is the confidential client confession of a dead college girl, my options are limited. If Ansel is protecting him, he’s untouchable.”

“How are any of us supposed to live in this world?” Melika needed encouragement. She needed Dr. Zhi’s wisdom. “Why aren’t we burning this school down brick by brick if this is what it has to offer?”

“I don’t know. You have to be careful about fires though, Melika. Once you light them, they’re out of your control. You don’t know what will get lost in their blaze.”


	10. You Know What You Did

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Teacher-student relationships, physical assault, blood.

Why the fuck didn’t I drive?

Sabine was furious with themself. Their Jetta was sitting at home. It was their college graduation present from their mother and the only car they knew they’d be able to afford for a very long time. Their Jetta was the car they only used when public transportation wasn’t an option.

Sabine and Melika were a couple blocks out from Terre, and Melika hadn’t said a word since they’d left the gallery. Melika was breathing again at least, and Sabine counted their blessings that they weren’t going to have to give Dr. Zhi an emergency late night call. Sabine wasn’t sure how “there” Melika was when they grabbed her hand and led her up the steps to the bus from Downtown to Lawrenceville.

Sabine swiped their bus card. Melika fumbled through her purse and fed three bucks to the bus’s cash machine. She paid no attention as a quarter popped out of the change receptacle and bounced down the bus’s stairs and into the sewers.

Sabine looked around the bus. They were shocked at how empty the bus was for Art Crawl night. There were only four other occupants.

The bus had four “benches” against the side walls at the front of the bus. At the back of the bus, there were four rows of tattered plush seating with the rows split down the middle, two seats on each side except for five seats in the unbroken back row.

Two guys in their early 20s were making out in the most rear of the benches against the driver-side wall. One of the men — a Korean jock in a forest green Hodges shirt that his muscles barely contained — had his hands under his boyfriend’s floral print t-shirt. The boyfriend — a Nordic twink — was nibbling on his beefcake’s ears. There was an elderly white man with a long beard and dagger-sharp fingernails muttering to himself at the passenger side bench closest to the entrance to the bus. His head was resting against the rubber partition that separated the benches. He was repeating a tale of incomprehensible non-sequiturs.

“She sings the song. She passes through walls. They watch. He does as he’s told. They try to kill themself for nothing. She knows. She knows. She knows.”

There was a middle-aged black woman in baby blue nurse’s scrubs at the very back corner of the bus reading a well-worn copy of Beloved. Sabine grabbed Melika’s hand and dragged her to the front row of the seats at the bus’s back.

The bus took off just as Sabine sat down and they wound up in Melika’s lap. Melika giggled and picked Sabine up and placed them on their seat. It was the first time Sabine had seen Melika smile since they’d left her alone at Terre.

“Are you okay? Do you want to talk now? Or should we wait til we get home?”

Melika shook her head quietly and put her arms around Sabine and held them against her shoulders. Sabine watched skyscrapers fade away to office buildings as the bus carried them out of downtown Pittsburgh. Sabine wanted to talk to Melika, but they knew she never talked on buses even when she wasn’t in the midst of a psychic vision induced anxiety attack.

The bus reached the last Downtown stop before you got to Lawrenceville. The twink and jock held hands as they walked out the front of the bus. The driver — a white guy in his late 30s, wearing a camo trucker cap — rolled his eyes as they walked out. The twink blew the bus driver a kiss and leapt off the bus steps and into the Pittsburgh streets with a balletic flourish.

As the driver shook his head in embarrassed frustration, Professor Arnoldson boarded the bus, and he had his right arm around the waist of an inebriated eighteen year old girl with long, straight blonde hair and a little black dress with what appeared to be most of a bloody mary spilled on the lower hem. The young woman was giggling at something Arnoldson whispered in her ear as he proceeded to kiss her neck and pay for both of their bus fares. Arnoldson led the girl by the waist to the benches opposite of the now departed gay lovers. Sabine could have spat on Arnoldson from their seat, but he never turned towards Sabine and Melika’s direction. He was too busy rubbing his hands down the back and hips and ass of his barely legal companion.

Sabine hadn’t seen Arnoldson since the OED party nine years ago with Melika. Melika hadn’t gone to any other OED parties after that, and Sabine had never been one for the big campus party scene to begin with. Sabine preferred intense gatherings with close friends. If they wanted an evening of orgiastic madness, they could always stop at Jardin. That was more their scene on a species level (and a queer level) than Hodges frat parties ever were.

Melika had told Sabine, however, those rumors of why Arnoldson had been chased out of New York. And when she had her vision in Dr. Zhi’s office, Sabine was the first (and, as far as Sabine knew, only) person that Melika had told. It had taken several hours of cuddles and video games to coax the information from Melika. When she’d shuffled back into their apartment after her appointment, Melika had been almost completely non-verbal. Sabine hadn’t seen their partner this distraught in years.

Sabine turned to Melika, praying that she was staring out the window and didn’t notice who was on the bus with them. Instead, Melika’s gaze was fixed on Arnoldson, and her fists were clenching. Melika was breathing at least. Sabine loved how tough their girlfriend was. How, when it mattered, Melika knew who the bad guys were and what we ought to do to them. Melika didn’t have the economic advantages Sabine had. Her parents were both college professors, but they had disowned their daughter after she came out as a woman. Melika had been on her own financially since she was twenty. And she kept ticking. She never stopped. Sabine knew they’d have cracked if they had to see everything Melika saw every day. If they had to carry every stray emotion of every person they touched every day.

Sabine looked back at Arnoldson and he was licking this teenager’s ear, and Sabine snapped. Sabine was never one for impulse control. It wasn’t a survival mechanism they ever needed to develop, and Sabine was not abiding this man’s predations for another second.

Sabine stood up and held the overhead rails of the bus as they walked to the side of Arnoldson and his companion. Arnoldson didn’t turn towards Sabine’s advancement until she was directly in front of him.

“You bastard! You gave me syphilis!”

Sabine slapped Arnoldson across the face, and all of the remaining eyes on the bus turned in Sabine and Arnoldson’s direction. The girl that had been giggling as Arnoldson kissed her neck before Sabine approached had stopped laughing and was looking at Arnoldson and Sabine in confusion. Sabine could tell that this girl was trying to figure out if they were a boy or a girl. Arnoldson’s “date” looked like she had just stepped out of one of those CW shows Sabine never told their serious art friends they watched. Cheek bones like a Hellenic sculpture and pouty lips. A designer purse that Sabine would have had to have sold more pieces than she had in the last six months to afford.

Arnoldson rubbed his face where Sabine had slapped him. There was a light red mark forming there. Sabine was not the most athletic of Hodges alumni. Arnoldson studied Sabine with his drunken, lascivious gaze and decided he didn’t recognize her.

“You must have me mistaken for somebody else, sweetie. I don’t have those problems.”

Arnoldson put his free arm around Sabine’s miniscule waist, stood up, and tightened his grip around Sabine and then picked her up and placed her in his lap. Arnoldson put his other arm back around his date’s waist and started rubbing her sides. The girl started laughing again.

Sabine was hyper-ventilating but not moving, not resisting. Sabine knew she hadn’t thought this through. She didn’t know what her plan was after she accused Arnoldson of giving her an STD. But she figured it would have been enough to scare the jailbait away and she’d figure out where she’d go from there. Sabine worked best under the barrel of a gun. But she hadn’t expected him to just grab her and for this girl to do nothing about it, and Sabine’s brain glitched out so that she could hardly process anything that was happening to her.

“Take your hands off of my partner or I’m calling the cops.”

Melika was standing in front of Sabine and Arnoldson. Her fists were clenched. Sabine had never seen this much anger in Melika’s eyes. The whole bus was still staring at them and the bus was slowing down for a nearby stop. Sabine craned her head around Melika and saw they had just hit the first stop in Lawrenceville. The only things around were a gas station and a school. Some bars a couple blocks away.

“Do I know you… lady?”

Arnoldson was studying Melika and was sobering up quickly. Without breaking Melika’s gaze, Arnoldson snatched a couple strands of Sabine’s hair as well as the eighteen year old who had stopped laughing again. The pain of having their hair yanked out tore Sabine out of their fugue state. Arnoldson’s grip on their waist had loosened as he studied Melika and Sabine got one of their arms free and placed their hand on Arnoldson’s face. Their eyes were less than an inch from each other.

“You know what you did.”

Melika wasn’t the only person in Pittsburgh with gifts. Sabine couldn’t see possible futures. They couldn’t touch someone and see their past or read their thoughts and emotions. Their powers were a little different.

The blood drained from Arnoldson’s ruddy face. His eyes — which moments before were glassy and distant — were sober and alert. Arnoldson’s face rotated swiftly between Melika, his date, and Sabine. Little rivulets of blood were leaking out of Sabine’s eyes. Arnoldson looked like he was going to throw up and as he blinked in disbelief and cornered guilt, Melika snatched the hairs out of his loose grip.

The bus screeched to a halt at the dimly lit stop in front of the Lawrenceville gas station and the Pittsburgh School for the Deaf.

“I need you all to leave. Right now.”

The bus driver had stood up and was staring at them. The side exit to the bus opened up right next to Arnoldson’s seat. Arnoldson shoved Sabine out of his lap and grabbed his date by the arm and stormed off the bus.

Sabine grabbed Melika’s hand and quickly followed.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Author’s Note: This chapter of Orchid was initially scheduled to go up on October 28th. Nic and I decided to delay publication of this part of our story after the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh out of respect to the victims and family of that horrific tragedy.
> 
> If you’ve been reading Orchid from the beginning, you may remember that one of our heroines, Robin Goldberg, is a young Jewish woman living in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh’s historically Jewish neighborhood. This chapter was going to be our first return to Robin’s part of the story since the second chapter. Like myself, Robin is a secular, non-practicing Jew who still takes great pride in her cultural heritage. However, as this chapter deals with contemporary anti-Semitism and how white nationalists use the internet as a platform to intimidate Jews and queer folks and people of color, Nic and I felt it was appropriate to let ourselves and others continue to grieve over the loss in Pittsburgh before we told a story about our own experiences with modern anti-Semitic violence.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Depictions of Anti-Semitism, Addiction, Drug Use, Anxiety, Depression, Cyber-Intimidation

Robin brushed her hair as she got ready for her fourth date with Virgil. A relationship had not been in Robin’s day planner for that summer. She was done with school. Robin had a summer to herself before she started teaching full time. She had thought maybe she’d make another movie. Robin had an idea for this low-budget home invasion thriller. Robin still wanted to talk to some friends about financing, but the only part of her life she seemed to be able to think or talk about anymore was Virgil.

_Relationship… Jesus. You’ve hung out three times._

Robin stopped brushing her hair. Her futile attempts to straighten her mane only seemed to be making it curlier. Virgil and Robin had danced their second night at  _Jardin_. Virgil ran her hands through Robin’s hair, lavishing attention on seemingly every curl as they danced and leaned against each other on the dance floor. Virgil had signed to Robin how beautiful her hair was. Virgil massaged Robin’s scalp as Robin danced with her back to Virgil’s chest and Virgil’s other hand traced endless, icy circles on Robin’s exposed midriff.

_Can you remember that touch now?_

Robin closed her eyes.

_Not today, you motherfucker_.

 

Robin opened her eyes and her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Todd. He said he could drop her off a quarter. Just needed to know when he could stop by. Robin said she was free now, and Todd said he’d be there in fifteen minutes. Todd always delivered to Robin and never charged extra. Robin was grateful for her weed dealer… although she also knew that she could rely on Todd in a pinch for the harder to procure wares.

Robin was dry, and more than anything on the planet,  she wanted a quick toke before she called a cab to take her to Phipp’s. Robin had barely smoked since her first evening at  _Jardin_. She hadn’t felt the constant need. A puff or two before bed and that was it. Robin was just coming to terms with how much she had been smoking that final semester at Hodges. She’d started going to some of her classes high. Not the ones she taught. Never. But her lectures and discussion courses were attended through at least two powersmoked bowls of fresh sativa as often as not. Robin hadn’t bought any grass off of Todd for a month and let the grass she had last as long as she could. Robin thought maybe she’d finally not have to hate herself for texting Todd just to buy his dope and not instead to hang out like he’d offered her half a million times. Maybe she was finally ready to give it up cold turkey.

Instead, Robin had texted Todd if he was holding. Her usual buy.

Robin’s internal vow of sobriety was shattered when she had checked the comments on her YouTube channel. Robin had all of her student films on Vimeo and YouTube, streaming for free. Robin had received an e-mail the night before she texted Todd telling her that there had been a sharp uptick in views for  _Monongahela Steel_.

_Monongahela Steel_  was the film Robin had promised to show Virgil during their first date. The film’s lesbian heroines, Magda Schoenberg and Toni Davis, had been played by Robin and one of her sisters in OED. The leads were an Orthodox Jewish woman ostracized from her family and a young black woman taking her brother’s place in the Oakes mills while he went to war. Robin had received a grant from the Hodges Endowment for the Arts for the production. One of the film’s auterist conceits was that their love story played out as a two person play in the ghostly shell of an abandoned Oakes Steel mill along the river in Hazelwood.  _Monongahela Steel_ got some play in film festivals in the tri-state area but nobody actually wanted to distribute the film commercially. It was too experimental/minimalist/gay.

Robin had been shocked to see hundreds of new visitors to the film in the last twenty four hours. The film had gained a devoted following of young lesbian hipsters, but that traffic had died off six months ago once the film had been sufficiently devoured by lesbian Tumblr. Robin was used to a couple dozen views a week and here were six hundred views in the last twelve hours.

Robin pulled up the YouTube link and immediately regretted her decision to check if there were any new comments on the video.

“Look at this fucking kike and…”

Robin wasn’t sure if there more anti-Semitic or anti-black slurs in the comments section.

“Ain’t there laws against bestiality in Pittsburgh.”

“Get out of my city, you fucking Jew dyke.”

“Movies like this make me wish we still had gas chambers for you Yids.”

“You make movies like this again, and we’ll find you, Juden rat. We know where you live.”

Robin’s Squirrel Hill address, short her apartment number, was posted below. Someone had responded with a gif of  _Schindler’s List_  which was followed up by a racist frog meme.

Robin was no stranger to anti-Semitism. When she was eight, she had visited her grandmother’s grave in Troy Hill. Her grandmother had been the city’s first Jewish woman doctor. It was the one year anniversary of her death. When Robin’s family showed up at the grave site, there were fresh swastika’s on her headstone and twenty others that were nearby. Robin had found out which of her friends’ parents didn’t like Jews when she knew which friends came to her  _bat mitzvah_  and which ones didn’t even though they’d been to all of her secular birthday parties before. A boy in high school at the Pittsburgh School for the Deaf had told Robin she’d be so much prettier if she didn’t have such a Jew nose. Robin had broken his nose and had been suspended from school for a month.

But seeing her home address layed out there on the Internet with those personal, specific death threats sent Robin into a justified, anxious spiral. She had never been doxxed before although she was familiar with the intimidation tactic. Robin possessed competent internet research skills and found the source of the hate mob that had been directed her way. A far right talk radio show had brought up her film in a piece about taxpayer money being wasted on decadent, pornographic media.  _Monongahela Steel_  had been funded by a private university endowment and there were no sex scenes in the film, but the show’s host hadn’t cared. The story had been picked up by several white nationalist and neo-fascist message boards, and the cavalcade of hate had steamrolled from there. Robin saw with forensic clarity how they had tracked down her address from various unintentional clues she had left on social media, including some Instagram shots of her neighborhood and the view from her apartment window. Robin watched the rabblerousers of the various groups coordinate a time to spam her accounts, and Robin dreaded the thought of opening her Twitter or Facebook accounts later in the day.

Robin was just staring at her mirror, barely aware of the passage of time and her brush long since dropped on the floor, when she saw the reflection of a bright purple light flashing behind her. The flashing light was connected to Robin’s bedroom door and could also be easily seen from her bed in the other corner of the room. Robin’s room was a barely controlled mess. Clothes sprawled across the floor. Papers strung across desks. Half-finished screenplays bursting out of drawers.

Robin stood up and left her bedroom. Her hair was as tamed as it was going to get. Robin’s bedroom was directly connected to the living room of her one-bedroom apartment which was only slightly less of a mess than the bedroom. There were shelves overflowing with books and films. The coffee table was empty except for a half-drank can of Dr. Pepper and a photo book of stills from the silent film era. Robin was a devotee of Fritz Lang’s early work and wished she could deliver a performance half as powerful and raw as Maria Falconetti in  _The Passion of Joan of Arc_. There was another bright purple light flashing above Robin’s fifty inch television and another light flashing in the tiny kitchen.

Robin’s calico cat, Lilian, was hissing at the door.

“Sorry, Todd. I’m coming,” Robin said, hoping she was loud enough.

Robin opened her lilac door and stared out at an empty hallway.

“Todd?”

Robin put her hand over her mouth and slammed the door shut

_We know where you live_.

Robin ran back to her bedroom as Lilian continued to hiss at the door. Robin grabbed her phone from her computer desk and started to dial 911 before laying the phone back on the desk and shaking her head in exasperated disbelief.

Robin had lived at this apartment for the last two years. Every now and then, a solicitor would “ring” her “doorbell” and when they never heard a chime or any immediate movement inside the property, they’d assume the doorbell was broken or no one was home and they’d go their merry way. It had happened nearly a dozen times. Her neighbors’ children would play in the halls and sometimes ring her bell on accident or for a gag and then run off before she had a chance to answer.

Robin chided herself for always jumping to the worst conclusion. Robin had seen the Nazis’ social media sites. They had only talked about scaring her. No one had mentioned actually showing up at her home.

_That doesn’t mean one of them won’t decide to be the cowboy._

Robin picked her phone back up just as the purple light started flashing again.

Robin stormed back to the living room. Lilian looked feral as she grimaced and screamed at the door. Robin pushed her face against the peep hole.

There was no one there.

Robin’s heart was racing. She flipped the switch next to the door that turned the lights off without having to open the door first. Robin put her hand back in her pocket where she had stored the phone and then pulled her hands right back out.

_You can’t call the cops. Your drug dealer is going to be here any second now_.

Robin slid down to the ground, with her back against the wall, next to the door. Lilian was still hissing and clawing at the air. Robin was desperately trying to hold back tears when the lights started flashing again.

“Leave me alone!”

Robin stood up and flipped the switch off. The lights started flashing again.

“You Nazi motherfuckers! I said leave me alone!”

Robin opened the door, and Virgil was standing outside.

**Author's Note:**

> The following RPGs inspired/provided the framework for Orchid:
> 
> [Powered by the Apocalypse](http://drivethrurpg.com/product/194344/Apocalypse-World-2nd-Ed?term=apocalypse+world&test_epoch=0) and the work of D. Vincent Baker  
> [Urban Shadows](http://drivethrurpg.com/product/153464/Urban-Shadows)by Andrew Medeiros and Mark Diaz Truman  
> [Microscope](http://drivethrurpg.com/product/91183/Microscope?term=microscope&test_epoch=0) by Ben Robbins
> 
> Tags will be updated as necessary!


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